


The Old Man and the Enterprise

by deadonarrival



Category: Star Trek
Genre: A little angst, Gay Sex, Georgia, M/M, Science, Star Trek - Freeform, doctors as patients are the worst, jim is a love struck teenager, leonard gets injured because he's an idiot, talk of canonical deaths, the ex wife
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-08-07 08:41:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 29,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7708399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadonarrival/pseuds/deadonarrival
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roughly ten thousand years ago (okay, seven) I started writing a fic to pay homage to my favorite stories and quotes and literature. I promised myself it would just be a one-off thing, and it turned into something much more. </p><p>It used to be on livejournal but I'm going to give it a second life here on AO3 since I don't post fic over there anymore and this particular story meant so much to me for so many reasons. If you saw it on LJ - don't worry, this is my fic, I'm the same author etc and I'll cross link the whole thing when I'm done. </p><p>I wanted to go back and change this, make little edits, but at the same time I think the errors aren't glaring enough to warrant any major revisions and if it's not as beautiful as it once was that's okay. I've grown and changed and it was only for fun. </p><p>I hope you find something you like in it too. </p><p>The life and times of James T. Kirk and Leonard H. McCoy; a series of short scenes which start on shore leave and end in the indefinable future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Alcoholic Persuasion

**Author's Note:**

> Dear readers; if you find a thing that you think I should tag for, do let me know.

Starfleet might have a long list of traits they associate with the ideal Captain. No doubt a string of complimentary adjectives which all coalesce into some definable person. Or this: A person, defined.   
  
That person is not James T. Kirk. That is what James T. Kirk says. That is what, then, _is_. Since he provides the definitive answer on who he is, obviously, being that person.  
  
McCoy would insert snide commentary on the point; arguing it into the ground because that is what he _does_. Not just because he is argumentative, but because he supports the fanciful notion that James T. Kirk is exactly what Starfleet is looking for in a Captain. He insists _this_ fact is the definitive since, as Jim is captain, it must mean something.   
  
So that: Just as James T. Kirk is the Unlikely Captain of the Starfleet Flagship; McCoy is an argument waiting to happen.  
  
He is gruff and Southern; liberal minded with a touch of conservative upbringing. He drawls a little more obviously when he's drunk or angry; the latter a condition he doesn't find himself in often, the former a condition he avoids discussing in polite company.   
  
McCoy is glad, then, that James T. Kirk is not polite company. He is probably the most impolite company a man could ask for.   
  
In addition to being an Unlikely Starflet Flagship Captain, James T. Kirk is an unmitigated asshole. He can hold his tequila like a professional, but still makes a face when he throws back Whiskey.   
  
A fact which McCoy feels unnecessarily smug about.   
  
James T. Kirk is his father's son; his mother seemingly having had no hand in his upbringing. (In the literal _and_ the figurative, McCoy points out.)   
  
(In fairness, McCoy is most likely the only person who knows that for fact. Others may speculate but since he has insinuated himself as the acting primary physician of James T. Kirk, he alone is privy to his File.)   
  
(File, emphasized with the uppercase as it is most important.)   
  
(It is, the definitive, file on James T. Kirk.)   
  
(Admirals have this information, Starfleet Academy personel in very quiet offices with attending minions and respectfully draped windows with rows of books that they most likely wrote also have this information; though it is also worth noting that they have not actually read the entire _File._ )   
  
Incoherency is a trait they both share after too many beverages of an alcoholic persuasion. McCoy usually hides his in a mostly non-vocal fashion. A sharp contrast to the almost horrifyingly tactile: I-Love-You-Man-Jim.   
  
Because after a half a bottle of what amounts to moonshine, James T. Kirk is _Jim_.   
  
Sometimes he is simply _Captain_ if McCoy is feeling particularly snide.   
  
Tonight he is _kid_.  
  
Tonight, McCoy has traded in grunts and non-verbal communication for slurred muttering and occasional gesticulations, most of which involve sloshing of some sort.   
  
Jim is quiet tonight. Kid has some sense, keeping his trap shut, just listening for once. Taking it all in - maybe it's filtering through for once. Maybe, in the morning, they'll remember it for once.   
  
Just this once.   
  
It's Jim's issues tonight. Sitting on the floor together. Rehashing the points that matter the most. The Kelvin, his mom, his stepdad, estrangement... you name it. The baggage is heavy and McCoy wonders absently if that's why he feels so weighed down all the time - if metaphorical baggage is finally, literally, weighing him down. Not just his baggage, Jim's baggage too.   
  
It's all in that damn File.  
  
"-because _I_ love ya - you're like - look kid, you're just _you_. You're good that way. Being _you_. You might be kinda insane, but thas' jus' speculation - don't let it get to ya. Sides' in the end ya got me anyways - none of them other fucks'll matter much in space."   
  
He grumbles and turns the bottle around in his fingertips. It's so much lighter than it was a half hour ago.   
  
"I'd kiss ya if ya wouldn't take it tha wrong way-"   
  
McCoy's throat feels raw in the back. He's not sure if it's the burn of the alcohol or if it's from talking so much. Maybe tonight he's talked too much.   
  
Jim is quiet tonight. Kid has some sense, keeping his trap shut, just listeining for once. Taking it all in - maybe it's filtering through for once. Maybe, in the morning, they'll remember it for once.   
  
Just this once...  
  
He wakes up with his face pressed into the side of the mattress. He's still on the floor. The bottle empty, within reach. He must have dropped it at some point. It's rolled away a bit, like it had to have clattered. He's disappointed in himself. He always is.   
  
He swears he won't drink again. That last night was it. The last hoorah. It is well and good over. Finished. Done.   
  
He can't take waking up like this anymore. He would say he is too old to be doing this. That he knows better - he needs to act like it.   
  
He picks up the empty bottle and throws it out first, as if willing all the negativity it brings to go with it. To take with it all the side effect and lingering sense of self-loathing.   
  
He picks up the file off the floor (The File; of which he has not only the true digital copy but also an archaic paper copy because he likes to be thorough) and checks to see which page it's been opened to this time.   
  
"James T. Kirk; age 11 - treated for laceration to face over right eye; complains of continuous mild headache, nausea, confusion.   
  
Diagnosis: mild concussion as attributed to light head trauma  
  
Cause: 'Fell off bike'  
  
Psych Evaulation--"   
  
McCoy pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes shut tight.   
  
The File snaps shut in his hand and he sets it aside on his pristine bed. A bed he did not sleep in.   
  
That no one has slept in.   
  
There is no pervasive smell throughout the hotel room, no telltale signs of inhabitance. It's just the Doctor, the File and Jim.   
  
Beam.   
  
Jim Beam.   
  
It's the only Jim he's talked to in days. A sad substitute for the real thing; a touch ironic in some ways.   
  
For McCoy, shore leave is supposed to be relaxing, happy... a time to go home and take care of himself before being sent back out into the constant triage of space. It's one accident after another; McCoy has never doubted his initial assertion - disease, darkness, death... it keeps him up to the elbows in vaccines, antibiotics and entrails.   
  
At least it's a job.   
  
Or it is for everyone else. Then again everyone else has home to go back to but not Leonard H. McCoy. Space is home. His hyposprays, PADD, biobeds and tricorder are _home_. Accoutrements of life itself.   
  
And Jim.   
  
Jim who still harbours some strange illusion of family with his rapidly deteriorating mother.   
  
James T. Kirk.   
  
He _is_. (The existential clause. [A clause indicating existence. Nothing more - generally posing under dummy subjects but Bones has long been fuzzy on grammatical jargon and tentative, subjective, linguistics shit - he thinks, with a vague amusement, that Lt. Uhura would know.])   
  
McCoy looks into the trash bin, the bottle, empty, glints back at him, winking in the artificial light of the room. He hates to admit that this is not the first time.   
  
He hedges against it being the last.   
  
****


	2. Classic Literature Endures

Sitting in the lobby with a book open in his lap ( _The Old Man and the Sea_ ) he ruminates less on the content and more on the futility of his endeavor. Positioning himself where he is most visible to all comings and goings of the hotel; and more than likely the comings and goings of a one, James T. Kirk. (In the event that he ever slept, which, knowing James T. Kirk is a flighty assumption.)  
  
In some ways it would be unsettling to be caught with a book that, thematically, does not match his personal... style. The aforementioned captain asked him once if he did nothing but read horrifying medical case files on the most notorious biological hazards in the known universe. Which, coming from the mouth of James T. Kirk was more along the lines of: "I bet you only read the scariest medical shit humanly imaginable."  
  
McCoy's response had been, "not just humanly."   
  
James T. Kirk had, from that point, avoided his bookshelf.   
  
Most likely for the better, as McCoy had no desire to explain the presence of _Pride and Prejudice_. Among others.   
  
The revolving door makes it's whisper-quiet sound as it rustles against the floor and shuffles pockets of human cargo from the exterior to the interior. The awkward fumblings of the Revolving-Door-Uneducated are the most amusing, and yet as each compartment spills it's contents out into the fashionably lit interior, there is a growing sense of disappointment.   
  
'I am harbouring illusions' - McCoy thinks this thought in the deepest reaches of his mind where he is articulate, educated and inoffensive - but it reinvents itself as a scoff when it reaches the motor functions associated with its delivery.   
  
"Happy to see you too, Princess."   
  
McCoy is past the point of startling. When you put your life, every day, into the hands of James T. Kirk you _really_ get over the thought of being scared as it becomes your entire existence.   
  
"I'm surprised," a lilting Southern drawl with a look to match, "it's not even mid-afternoon and already you're up and presentable - if I didn't know better I'd almost call you responsible."   
  
The book, _The Old Man and the Sea_ , falls closed and leans haphazardly against McCoy's knee, exposing itself to examination by any casual passer-by; or, more importantly, to James T. Kirk.   
  
He pauses to let McCoy's feinted insult dissolve into the ether before he leans forward and thumbs the edge of the paperback, "I never knew you had a memoir, Bones - I'm hurt you haven't let me read it yet."   
  
A beat, and the almost unbidden _knowing_ that there is something amiss. Some strained point in James T. Kirk's voice. A voice normally assured and strong if not smug.   
  
Going along with the setup, McCoy rolls his eyes and presses the book into the space that exists between his leg and the arm of the chair.   
  
"You on your way in?" he insinuates with five words that James T. Kirk has been out all night; but in an act of forgiveness he turns his attention in that direction anyways and receives an indifferent shrug. He takes up residence in the chair next to McCoy and they both seem to speak with _'breathe in, breathe out.'_   
  
"Bones, we have sixty-seven hours of leave left."   
  
"You count in hours?"   
  
"Sometimes it's all you've got."   
  
They concede the point together, staring straight ahead at the revolving door.   
  
"What'dya want to do with your last sixty-seven hours then?"  
  
"I hadn't thought about it. I thought, before, maybe I would spend more time with my mom."   
  
McCoy sees the answer written in physical obscurity without having to have it spelled out, though he knows, inevitably, the reply will come. Without speaking he simply turns fully in his seat to view James T. Kirk in profile.   
  
He has his feet kicked up on a coffee table and his hands are interlocked behind his head. Casual observers might say he was relaxed, but McCoy has a better grasp of the physiology of James T. Kirk.   
  
He is overly tight in places, almost uncomfortably so, like a wound re-stitched too many times. This is not something that James T. Kirk (remember: existential) _is._ He is a great many things, a great many adjectives and titles and replayed descriptors but he is not merely existing; he is not held together. There is a pinch to his mouth, thin, smile forced. Where he is usually languid and easy, today he is weary and paper thin.   
  
"She passed away last night."   
  
McCoy nods, confirmed in his fears and assumptions, "I-"  
  
"-yeah."   
  
The hands come down and one reaches out to rest on McCoy's shoulder. A squeeze, as if he has to support McCoy about what has happened; as if it is McCoy who has a mother to mourn.   
  
He is no longer Unlikely Captain of the Starfleet Flagship, he is Jim.   
  
It did not take half a bottle to get there, it just takes human emotion.   
  
Ruefully: Emotion, something McCoy occasionally feels he has too much of.   
  
"Jim."   
  
McCoy's hand covers the one on his shoulder and he pats in a reassuring way. It could be construed as parental but that is not his intent.   
  
Jim slouches forward and his free hand is over his eyes almost as though he could be doing nothing more than soothing a headache. He pulls his other hand away from McCoy and then both are over his face; hiding there from the reality of his life.   
  
An arm over his shoulders - it belongs to McCoy - and it draws them closer together. He feels a face press into his hair and despite the fact that the hotel is a hub of activity and a central location for all laid over or vacationing Starfleet personel, they are not ashamed.  
  
****  
  



	3. Whoever Believes in Him Shall Have Eternal Life

McCoy grew up in a Baptist church. It was settled into the mountains as if it had grown out of the rock itself. The roof blended seamlessly into the trees in the fall and he wonders now if it's still standing. It was a relic in his time, he imagines that if it could withstand the years leading up to his arrival then in his departure, it too must stand against whatever new zealots have taken over.

The last sermon he heard there was on Proverbs, Chapter Six, Verses One through ThirtyFive. The part he remembers most clearly is:

_There are six things which the Lord hates,  
Yes, seven which are an abomination to Him:  
Haughty eyes, a lying tongue,  
And hands that shed innocent blood,  
A heart that devises wicked plans,  
Feet that run rapidly to evil,  
A false witness who utters lies,  
And one who spreads strife among brothers._

He thinks it must be so clear because the next day, a Monday, he was served divorce papers. The message resonated with him; he remembers.

He shifts on the bed and Jim wraps tighter against his side.

They lay fully clothed on top of the covers and neither one has slept. The room is dark save for the electronic glow of numbers on the digital alarm clock that casts only enough light to be a nuisance but not worth the effort to unplug.

Staring at the ceiling McCoy thinks, with an almost hysterical and inappropriate bubble of laughter in his throat, about if they still place Bibles in the side tables.

He would check, but it takes one arm to wrap around Jim's shoulders, rubbing small circles that are attributes of comfort; the other hand occupied in the way it lays overtop Jim's arm that stretches across McCoy's chest. He marvels at the thought of religion surviving through time, the complexity of man, the dense recesses of the human heart and in the end what God would say to it all.

Humanity has come so far, they can heal bones within hours, regrow skin overnight... the barbaric medicine of the 21st century is a distant nightmare, one that only remains on planets lacking resources and in the cold confines of educational literature. Sometimes he thinks maybe the underlying dream of advancement is to forget pain altogether and move forward into emotionless oblivion. The separation of medicine and touch is a harbinger into this same black hole.

In short: to avoid scars, avoid tactility.

The dark presses in on them both, and with Jim wrapped around his side, McCoy thinks of being young and reckless. Jim's face is still so young, it lacks physical maturity even though emotions have aged his eyes to nearly forty. But asleep and dreaming, he remains innocent, undisturbed, loved and unhurt. McCoy remembers that feeling, distant though it is. He remembers falling in love, or what he thought was love, and how they held hands and kissed where no one could see and talked about the indefinable future. One that rushed in too fast when he looks back: How he proposed, who his best man was, what Jocelyn looked like standing at the far end of that aisle.

_'We are gathered here today--'_ plays in his mind like a warped 12 inch 45; a relic.

Then again that seems to be what his whole life is, a relic. A diorama that, in this new fragmented future, is easily viewed from the outside. Everything old seems so small and insignificant.

"Bones?"

McCoy becomes aware of Jim's voice less through audial recognition and more through the way it vibrates through his body - a low, quiet thunder - impending storm metaphor and all.

"Hm?"

Jim's words are slurred together in his half-wakened state, but McCoy makes out the strains of 'wanted to make sure you were still here.' It sounds nothing like that - bleeds together like oversaturated watercolor strokes.

It must be irony that today at the funeral when reading inspirational pieces that they chose:

_"'My son, keep your father's commands and do not forsake your mother's teaching,'Proverbs Six, Verse Twenty, let us pray."_

McCoy feels like it was a pointed message at him; the last time he heard Proverbs Six he was putting his marriage in the ground; today he put Jim's mother there too, figuratively speaking. (Literally: she is in what amounts to baggage handling for boarding on the USS Enterprise; her ashes, per request, to be scattered into space.)

It would be poetic if it were not so maudlin.

When Jim's muscles begin to slacken and his breathing comes in even lines, McCoy considers sleep. A novelty he has been missing out on in recent days. As he closes his eyes and kisses into Jim's hair, he wonders if he'll go to Hell for this: being the Argument for the Unlikely.

****

"I'm pregnant."

The floor seemed to move underneath him as Jocelyn leaned against the doorframe of the bathroom holding an accusatory pregnancy test up as if blaming it on him in entirety.

"I'm sorry?"

She had screamed at him for that.

He had slept on the couch.

For a month.

When he thinks about it, the marriage was already disintegrating then; maybe the pregnancy had been the tipping point.

He thinks maybe it was supposed to make them happy. In a way, Joanna did make them happy. Just not happy with each other.

Jim startles awake; shooting up on the bed and only then does McCoy realize that he hadn't been sleeping for a few hours. The dark room is disorienting that way; all consuming black that makes you think you see the inside of your eyelids and into the recesses of REM sleep but the truth is you're staring instead into the bleak un-changing, temperature-controlled suite.

He's breathing heavy, hiccuping to try and get in as much air as he can. McCoy doesn't move, just runs his hand up and down Jim's back, soothing. Maybe suggesting.

"Lay back down, Jim," McCoy's voice is hoarse from sleep or lack there of and he fists his fingers in the back of Jim's shirt enough to tug him down and back to bed.

But Jim, being Jim, could never go willingly. He fights it. The way he fights everything that really bothers him - he is silent and thoughtful, resilient to persuasion.

McCoy wishes he had any resiliency to Jim.

Jim goes eventually though, which is not surrender so much as it is a mutual awakening of combined ideals; a silent negotiation. His face is wet when it touches McCoy's shirt. The thin material that stretches taut over his chest is not impervious to liquid; he hesitates to classify if it is sweat or tears and his science mind lineates that both being organic in nature and having a similar salinity are thus both equal beyond his comment.

****

 


	4. The Life Unlived

Night is restless and treds into early morning, then morning and finally early afternoon. Neither of them feel compelled to move and McCoy attempts speculation as to whether either of them has slept. He concludes that they most likely slept in alternating shifts.   
  
They sleepwalk through preparations to board the ship and at some point McCoy realizes they became one entity. He, Leonard H. McCoy has in fact merged with James T. Kirk to formulate 'we' - a nomination that may infer further than platonic togetherness. A not wholly incorrect assumption.   
  
Before they leave the hotel room, Jim wraps his arms around McCoy and they hug just inside of the door. A ship as demanding as the Enterprise leaves no room for naked emotion. They have to acknowledge that when they walk out of this door they return to a staid Doctor & Captain facade.   
  
They haven't spent much time at all on this leave. Jim was with his mother. McCoy was languishing in the sterile hotel wishing for active duty.   
  
He digs his fingers into the back of Jim's uniform and pulls him in as hard and close as he can. This unrestrained desperation never has to walk out the door with them. They can chalk it up to whatever they want. Displace the blame, so to speak.   
  
Jim buries his face into McCoy's shoulder and tries to count what he has left. The numbers get smaller every year, but at least he has his Bones.   
  
They prepare a face to meet the faces they will meet and despite a few wrinkles and dark circles they are ready to leave.   
  
His hand on the door and McCoy touches the small of his back.   
  
They share a look and this:   
  
"Jim."   
  
Silence, if only what crossed in looks could convey itself in words not too-tired to manifest...   
  
"I-" he starts.   
  
"-know." Jim finishes.  
  
McCoy shuts his mouth and looks away.   
  
Jim's voice is soft, almost silent, "I do too."   
  
They both look at the ground. Because looking at each other is sometimes too much. This friendship that constantly oversteps itself begins to unfold in that dark hotel room.   
  
Though, if examining the situation from crosscuts of their lives leading into that moment, one would discern that it has been unfolding since they first introduced themselves.   
  
An exit.   
  
****


	5. Babylon Revisited

A starship shouldn't be able to put things into perspective so easily, and yet it does.   
  
Perhaps without the glowing distortion of life happening around them too fast as it does on earth. James T. Kirk and Leonard H. McCoy find sudden comfort in routine.   
  
Idle hands have long been marked as a tool for evil, yet McCoy thinks that idle hands are only a tool for the idle mind. Which is the truest form of evil he can identify.   
  
It is when he is alone that he thinks, and that things start to unravel. He has come unstuck in time.   
  
Physically he resides behind his desk in sickbay, reading new medical journal reports on his PADD, drinking coffee, thinking of the upcoming vaccination schedule. But in the back of his mind, things churn up unbidden. Memories of his youth, of his parents, of the turmoil of his decisions.  
  
The thing about Georgia is that it never seems to age. It isn't even a compliment, it's more a statement of fact. While the rest of the world goes on around it, Georgia has remained in limbo. Despite the city shooting upwards into the scientific advancement age, the rural farmlands seem to be stuck in a different century.   
  
It has always been this way.   
  
The iron-clad ideals of a God-fearing population hold these counties in the past; talking of doomsday, the Second Coming and the Rapture. They refuse to believe that maybe the Rapture isn't coming for another ten thousand years, they believe it's coming tomorrow: always, tomorrow. But instead of living there, they cling desperately to a past they are familiar with.   
  
One they say has served them well since the beginning of time and one that they think will serve them just as well until the end. Alpha & Omega.   
  
McCoy thankfully had enough sense to question any ridiculous notion that crossed his plate; theology not withstanding.   
  
It is not to say that he does not believe, but merely that he takes a more liberal approach.   
  
Remember: everything in moderation.   
  
Which is strange considering Georgia itself is extremes; liberal, social downtown collaborative-types offset by fearful, conservative rural singularities. 105 degree summers; 5 degree winters. But four beautiful seasons.   
  
He thinks that's really what he misses the most about "home" - the weather. The Enterprise controls all facets of temperature and climate leaving nothing to chance; the only time any of them experiences anything even a decimal point above 'normal' is when they're on shore leave back on Earth or if they're on some far flung distant planet.   
  
Maybe man was not supposed to live this way. Regulated temps year round and unable to experience fluctuations and seasonal change. It takes something out of you - resilience; something McCoy wishes he had in regards to James T. Kirk.  
  
And no matter how many years he's been in space he will always remember the way fall smells in Georgia (apples, decaying leaves, woodsmoke). How every leaf on the non-evergreens fades from the vivid hue of summer to shades of red, orange and gold. He remembers the way the Birch bark peels from the trees like a Dead Sea Scroll; It's all a lead-in to the death that precludes winter, but it is a beautiful death.   
  
In the early part of the year is when the temperature drops and becomes unbearable to anyone raised south of the Mason-Dixon line (something that is so far gone in the reaches of history that it is reduced to a cameo and a footnote in texts). Snow happens in the northern part of the state, occasionally south of the capital and no matter how old you are, you still find joy in watching it all come down around you.   
  
He remembers the world disappearing under a blanket of all consuming white, the joy of making a snow man, of throwing snow balls, of making snow angels and the bite of Real Cold as it soaked through his clothes.   
  
The river didn't freeze that year, it wasn't _that_ cold. Exploring by the banks, as if the world were transformed entirely and not merely disguised as clean, he watched Canadian geese bob over the rapids, well adjusted to the freezing water.   
  
He had gotten sick that winter.   
  
He forgets with what.   
  
"Bones?"   
  
McCoy looks up from where he has been slumped over his desk scribbling absently and without any content in the margins of his PADD.   
  
"Capta-"  
  
"Jim."   
  
"Jim," McCoy has to pause and find the caustic edge to his voice, "what'd you go get your fool self into this time?" Arms crossed over his chest, leaning back, self-aware, as if only thirty seconds prior he hadn't been day dreaming like a homesick little girl.   
  
_Joanna_   
  
His mind brings up the thought unbidden and his heart aches suddenly so hard that he nearly misses,   
  
"--and I can't sleep. Is there, something for that?"   
  
He pauses at the most inconvenient of times, a speech pathologist would have a field day with him, but Bones understands, he sees through the grammatical wasteland and nods, standing up and jerking his head in the direction of a cabinet filled with sedatives and non-narcotic sleep aids.   
  
He pulls out a hypospray and loads the cartridge as he turns back to Jim and finds him absently rubbing his neck, a pre-emptive reaction.   
  
"If I stick you here you'll-"  
  
"-is there room?"   
  
McCoy taps the hypospray against his fingertips and mentally evaluates the beds in use today.   
  
But Jim is the Captain, Jim is _Jim_ ; if no beds were available, McCoy would _make_ one available, or forfeit his own.   
  
That is after all what friends do?   
  
(It is posed as a question despite the lack of a true interrogative nature, he posits it as such because he questions, inherently, the Relationship that exists between himself and Jim; but at the same time, considers it statement of fact. The question then is tonal.)  
  
"Yeah." McCoy finally answers and he ushers Jim to the biobed nearest his office, "yeah..." he reiterates for lack of something better and watches Jim hop up onto the bed.   
  
"Wake me up if Chapel wants to give me a spongebath," Kirk winks in the aforementioned nurse's direction as she walks by with supplies in tow. She has the good grace to acknowledge him, but only with a cocky raise of her brow.   
  
She knows better.   
  
"Flirtin' with the nurses is off-limits, you know that, Jim."   
  
(It's affectionate, _this_ tone, thus negating any previous evidence to suggest that the two of them may be otherwise.)  
  
The hiss of the hypospray as the cartridge releases into the syringe is familiar, though Jim always instinctively flinches. He has just enough time to brush his hand along McCoy's side, squeezing at his hip with a smug look before he's out cold.


	6. The Totality of True Thoughts is a Picture of the World

Leave it up to James T. Kirk to manage injury on even the most peaceful of missions. His call for a landing party usually signals a pall over the non-officer staff as it inevitably means someone isn't coming home. James T. Kirk knows his track record, but knows that he is a good captain; the best. Or so McCoy informs him.   
  
Because it is McCoy who reminds him of this after every away mission. Because it is McCoy who is patching him up and knows that James T. Kirk never asks any one of his team to do anything that he would not do himself. He has the medical record to prove it. Not to mention James T. Kirk's _Odyssey_ -esque stories that he tells over drinks.   
  
He admits that if at any point on the mission he is not caught dangling from a ledge, running for his life, ducking hostile fire or putting his neck on the line then the mission is not a success.   
  
McCoy attempts to instill some kind of fear into James T. Kirk about mortality, but it never works. He always comes back, but each time it's almost progressively worse. He finds some new, inventive way to injure himself.   
  
And when he thinks about it, McCoy realizes that the problem with modern medicine is this: it heals too fast to really make you hurt. So you know no bounds and intentionally damage yourself just to remember feeling.   
  
He defers back to if the human body were ever meant for this. For space. For reconstruction without touch, for diagnosis without in depth exploration. Medicine has given up the barbaric edge of the early civilizations and finally understands the benefit of not cutting. After all, though many things have changed throughout time, the medical motto has never ceased to be "do no harm." Surely in the early ages, they felt they were not harming in order to save a life by slicing into human flesh. They just didn't have the advancement to cure without hurt. Now there's hardly ever hurt in medicine. At least, not the pain of surgery followed by months of recovery.  
  
In turn, vanity seems to have crept into medicine without anyone noticing. Scars are out of fashion now, even though some people still carry them. You of course could have them lasered away, but the diehard wear them like badges of honor.   
  
A case in point: McCoy fell off his horse when he was sixteen, riding in a local, small town rodeo doing barrel races. He'd cleared two out of three, and on the third barrel, Cassidy'd slipped in the sliding turn and Bones, even with an almost unaturally good seat had fallen into the barrel.   
  
Through denim he'd torn a hole in his knee (the scar he kept) and a laceration on his head had been mended with little more than a hairline pinch of skin to remind him it had ever happened.   
  
There had been a concussion too but like any good rider, he never let it keep him out of the saddle.   
  
Cassidy had broken her leg though, and despite medical advances, she had to be put down. They said the trauma of it would make her skittish and even if the bone was healed right, she'd still try to favor a good leg. Hip problems, bone displacement, mental this that and the other.   
  
Apparently horses were not mentally prepared for immediate healing quite like humans. Humans expect instant gratification in the way of medicine; horses, unchanging since prehistory aside from domestication, do not.   
  
He tells people that that the first woman to ever break his heart was Cassidy. The only person who knows it was a horse is James T. Kirk.   
  
So McCoy thinks that maybe emotional pain the only real kind that's left. Is that what makes them feel anything anymore? Does it have to be pain? Emotional pain is the only thing he's ever seen move First Officer Spock; but the more he thinks about it, it wasn't pain so much as it was love, undying, unyielding love for his mother that made him hurt so much.   
  
So emotions then; he begins to wonder when they'll have a hypospray for curing that too.  
  
"Bones?" Jim's voice is gravelly.   
  
McCoy looks up from where he's reading _The Great Gatsby_ and folds it back onto his lap, reaching out to adjust Jim's blanket and read his vitals.   
  
Jim rolls over on his side so that he's facing McCoy who looks like he maybe hasn't slept since the day he left.   
  
"Do you hurt anywhere?" McCoy asks.   
  
"Sore all over, I'll be fine."   
  
McCoy just nods; he knows Jim will be fine, he's the one who healed him.   
  
"One of these days I'm going to treat you like they did in the dark ages to teach you a lesson about the mortality of humans."   
  
McCoy is gruff, Jim smiles.   
  
"Tell me about your book."   
  
"1920's Earth," McCoy picks up the paperback and turns it over in his hands. He's always had an appreciation for the bound books that belong in a museum. He could get any of them on his PADD but it's not the same.   
  
Jim keeps looking at him intently and McCoy realizes he doesn't know how to describe _The Great Gatsby_. It just _is_. Like Jim.   
  
He figures Jim's had enough sedative to never remember this conversation in the morning, "it's about you and me kid. You're the green light."   
  
Jim's already blinking his heavy eyelids, drifting back out and all McCoy can think about while watching him is that if he'd written the book the light would've been blue.   
  
"And who are you?" Jim asks, sleep in his heavy voice.   
  
"Gatsby."  
  
"Are you a doctor there too?"  
  
He's barely awake now and McCoy reaches out to push his hair back, fingers straying too long against his face, "nah, but I make a livin' out of watchin' you."   
  
"Sounds about right," and a smile. The words are so quiet McCoy almost doesn't hear them. He know's Jim's asleep because his fingers go slack and it's then that McCoy realizes Jim was holding his other hand.   
  
In the end, nothing ever saves anyone's life, it just postpones their death. And yet, it is the last enemy that shall be destroyed. Corinthians.   
  
****  
  
Chapel takes over the sickbay, because McCoy finally fell asleep. Something he's been missing out on in recent days.   
  
At 0600 she goes to wake him for his shift but pauses at the door, deciding she's okay for another couple of hours.   
  
McCoy's head is on the bed, one arm over Jim's hips the other limply hanging down, the book having dropped from his fingers to the floor. She can tell McCoy is still sleeping in the steady rise and fall his air intake creates. Jim's awake though, fingers combing through McCoy's hair and though she sees his mouth moving, no sound is audible.   
  
She knows by the words she is missing that the value of _'I love you'_ is passing between the two. A moment unguarded, one that she will never mention.   
  
She gives instructions to not disturb the Captain and takes up in sickbay where McCoy would have.   
  
****


	7. Now, Voyager

He's had a bad day today.   
  
It started with Nurse Chapel ejecting him from sickbay for being _abusive_. She said his litany of overbearing orders was oppressive to the staff and he'd be better serving them by getting _out_.   
  
She had quite a way with punctuation, intonation and a glare that could quite possibly kill a man.   
  
They stood in the door to sickbay arguing in whispers until Christine had shoved the PADD into his chest and hissed, " _you_ are emotionally compromised, get _out_." She pointed in the direction of his quarters and he growled in response.   
  
Emotions. Apparently they did _not_ have a hypospray to cure that yet, and until they did they were enough to have him ejected from the one place he felt he might have been able to find solace on today of all days.   
  
He waits in the hallway, staring at the door, back rigid, fingers clutching the PADD in his hand too hard. He is written into the scene as tense, shoulders set, and despite it all he is fragile.   
  
The door slides open and he knows, as soon as he crosses the threshold that something in this sterile, created environment is _off_.   
  
"Bonesy~"   
  
McCoy lets out the breath he did not know he was holding and tosses his PADD aside. Jim sits on the floor, back against a wall, dangling a bottle of tequila (1/5 of which is missing) from his fingertips.   
  
McCoy sinks down against the wall that faces Jim and they look at each other as if sizing one another up.   
  
If any two people have legitimate reasons to truly despise father's day, it would have to be Leonard H. McCoy and James T. Kirk.   
  
There are 365 days in a traditional Earth Year, 364 of those days are dedicated to many pursuits. But today is a whole day, twenty four hours, dedicated solely to fathers; something that Jim is not and does not have and something that McCoy is and that he killed. (He is unsure which of the two is most appalling.)  
  
They lean against opposite sides of the short hallway that segue McCoy's living area from his bedroom and pass the bottle of tequila between them.   
  
Different alcohol gets you drunk in different ways. Vodka always makes Jim a little dizzy, rum makes them both over-full, whiskey leaves a burn in its wake, and gin never satisfies. But tequila is light enough, powerful enough and vile enough to make you regret it, love it and hate it all at the same time.   
  
It's exactly what they need, excluding of course each other.  
  
Jim tries not to talk about his father, though unbidden thoughts waiver at the surface. He used to be bitter, now he thinks he's just sad. Instead he talks about his stepfather ( _he was kind of a dick, if that's what elusive means_ ). McCoy talks about Joanna ( _she called this mornin', said she missed me, wanted t'spend time with me next leave I had; showed me her new puppy her mom got her. Fuckin' Jocelyn--_ ). Jim talks about his brother ( _I wish I had better contact with him, it was kind of weird seeing him at the funeral. **Fuck** , Bones, my Mom is gone too now, this **sucks**_ ). McCoy talks about his father ( _I wish I'd been more patient; of all the people I coulda failed it had to be him_ ). Then _Jim_ talks about McCoy's father ( _you did everything you could - he was ... he was in so much pain, he knew it was a possibility but -- look Bones you can't blame yourself_ ). The bottle gets lighter and so do their shoulders. The weight of their lives seems to ease off after every shot. Jim finally slides across and sits next to McCoy. They are touching from thigh to shoulder and the bottle is empty.   
  
"What's your... your favorite father's day memory?" Jim asks, his words somehow not slurring together, or maybe it's only how he hears them in his head.   
  
"The first one after Jo was born."   
  
Jim nods and feels McCoy hunch forward. He slides his arm across McCoy's shoulders and draws him in. As soon as he's close enough, Jim wraps his other arm around him too and rests his chin on top of McCoy's head, tucking the older man into his chest.   
  
"You're a great father."   
  
"I'm shit at it," McCoy's words are muffled into Jim's shirt.   
  
"You're just doing your job, Bones. You're a great father. You love her more than anything ya know?"   
  
McCoy slides down the rest of the way until he's laying half in Jim's lap, rolled onto his side and curled over Jim who just keeps holding him.   
  
"Bones, bones, bones..." Jim says it as though he's only satisfying some drunken idea of repition, and McCoy lets it slide.  
  
Only marginally.   
  
They banter.   
  
McCoy mentions dinner, Jim insists tequila _is_ dinner. (His argument is: "it's from a cactus sort of plant - that's a fruit. We had fruit for dinner.") McCoy drunkenly lectures on the benefits of a balanced diet. (Concluding with: "I'm a doctor Jim, I _know_ these things.")  
  
Neither of them moves to get up to rectify the situation.   
  
"It's too bright..." McCoy mutters to break the silence. It takes four tries to dim the lights.   
  
1\. "Lightsafiftahfuck that's not what I want-"  
2\. "Lits aft - JIM. Sit STILL you're throwin' meoff--"  
3\. "Lights. Lights at-- liifts... lah.. shit did you say fifteen? SHIT."  
4\. "Lights at fifteen persons."   
  
"Persons" with a lisp is close enough to "percent" for the computer to accept this command and they have darkness to cure the ills of their innebriation. The properties of alcohol which make it a systemic depressant, and thus induce sleep, overtake both of them. They fall asleep on the floor; Jim leaning back against the wall, McCoy across his lap.   
  
That night he dreams of only one thing. That which he was born for. In this instance it is medince, it is healing.   
  
He twitches when he dreams, and it wakes Jim up from time to time. Jim never complains, he never even brings it up. He likes when it's just him, and he gets to be the one to hold Bones together. He should feel like he owes it to him, after all the times that Bones has been there to hold _him_ together. Yet this is not merely a debt to be repaid, it is _them_. Companionship, friendship, understanding and always something more lurking under their actions.   
  
When Bones falls asleep and he's close like he is now, Jim thinks of all the things he feels, all the things he doesn't say, and he says them then. Sometimes what he says isn't even audible, just his mouth moving and forming the words and knowing them in his mind.   
  
Tonight he brushes his knuckles along Bones' jaw and leans in close so that their noses bump and foreheads touch. And he knows Bones sleeps so heavy it won't even phase him. He moves in that last fraction of an inch, kissing him so soft and breathes out the words with his self-assured cocky smile tugging up the corner of his lips, _"I'm the man who loves you."_  
  
****


	8. But I'll Leave You Now, With Myself, The Man I Used to Be

McCoy braces himself in a doorway as the Enterprise shakes around him, his eyes widen and his breathing is fast and shallow.   
  
"God _damnit_ , Jim!" He hisses the words out and stumbles as he fights his way down to the turbolift which is blessedly open in front of him, all he has to do is make it there.   
  
People are frantically running through the halls to one station or another; Jim's voice seems faded over the noise, "WE ARE AT RED ALERT-"   
  
The ship shudders again and he slips, falling hard on his knee, shocks of pain radiating outwards. He scrambles against the slick floors finally righting himself just as debris breaks loose from the interior. He is stumbling forwards and sees the lift doors right before the ship lurches once more and he hits the wall and everything goes white.   
  
****  
  
He dreams of cicadas in the early evening. The low hum and buzz they create that makes the very air vibrate with life.  
  
How the sky fades out to warm tones and breaks over the cloud line to illuminate the foothills of the Blueridge Mountains.   
  
He can hear the soft calls of birds in the distance, can see the fireflies winking in and out of existence over the creek that runs along the side yard and widens as it breaks past the fence and into the pasture.   
  
He dreams of humidity so dense it makes it hard to breathe. And then he dreams of dawn. Because sunsets are for death. He dreams of waking up to early morning on the farm; the pre-dawn darkness that faded from navy blue to purple and into grey. The best part was when the sun crept high enough to crest the horizon; light shafts shot through the trees and got caught in the fog that hovered too-long in the low laying valleys. The air was sticky, his lungs felt overfull when he'd breathe too deep.   
  
And suddenly it hurts. Breathing. The porch swing creaks under him in a perfect rhythm, but he doesn't feel it rocking.   
  
****  
  
He wakes up in a biobed, the creaking of the porch swing is a heart monitor and Nurse Chapel hovers over him with a tricorder, a small cut above her eye seems pronounced as she arches it at him.   
  
"Running in the halls, Dr. McCoy?"   
  
He grimmaces as the Georgia summer fades from his mind and he remembers he is as far away as he can be from that life.   
  
McCoy opens his mouth to speak but nothing comes out except a rasp and he tries to sit up, intending to get himself a cup of water.   
  
Chapel shoves him down onto the bed and pokes him in the shoulder with the stylus for her PADD; the tricorder discarded. "Try to sit up and I'll sedate you again."   
  
"Again?" McCoy half-coughs the word out and looks around, "w..water?"  
  
"You weren't exactly the most cooperative patient," Chapel looks rueful as she hands him water and McCoy is sheepish.   
  
He looks around the room and takes in the number of people currently occupying his sickbay.   
  
Every bed is taken. Overfill are sitting in chairs and being administered to wherever they can be. He has a sudden stab of fear - is Jim there? Is he hurt?   
  
"Let --" McCoy pushes himself up onto his elbows and Christine is already fingering a hypospray, "--Jesus woman, there's people out there needin' a bed more than I do; the least I can do is go do some initial diagnosis an' let someone else get in here-"   
  
She frowns, "you are the CMO, Dr. McCoy, the faster your recovery time, the sooner you can return to acvtive duty."   
  
McCoy frowns back at her and examines the way Christine has phrased her words. 'Return to active duty' implies that active duty is in the past; which would mean his current status is that of off-duty. And Jim. Where is Jim - he would never take him off duty in a situation like this.  
  
"Whaddaya mean 'return'?" There is fire in his eyes but his head nurse is unmoved.  
  
Christine sniffs and gathers her essentials, "you've been relieved from active duty by Captain Kirk, Doctor. Until a full recovery is made."   
  
There is a fleeting moment of relief, if Jim's put him off duty then Jim's not dead. The relief is replaced by a small dose of fury and McCoy growls. He is _off active duty_.   
  
"Goodnight doctor."   
  
"Goodnight?" McCoy turns his head just in time to catch Christine aiming the hypospray.   
  
"Wh- NO!"   
  
His muscles, sluggish, don't respond fast enough and the last thing he sees is Christine rolling her eyes at him.   
  
"He makes the worst patient..." she mutters to herself and McCoy dreams of stars.   
  
****  
  
It was four days after Father's Day...   
  
... the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701 is engaged by hostile   
forces outside of subspace and sustains enough damage to  
force a return trip to Earth's docking station.   
  
Casualties are minimal due to the quick actions of Captain  
James Tiberius Kirk and his crew. Injuries sustained to  
those on board were numerous, but are being treated by the  
staff of Cheif Medical Officer Leonard Horatio McCoy, who  
was injured during the engagement and is currently on  
medical leave.   
  
During the engagement...  
  
****  
  
McCoy hears the echoes of a soliloquy reverberating in his mind and he reaches out to touch the words as they become tangible all around him. He has never been in this place. This all-consuming darkness where nothing is illuminated but words.   
  
They are nice words, all of them. Some familiar, some not. Some form sentences and quotes and lyrics and he runs his fingers over the finely formed letters and wonders if he can keep all these things.   
  
He has some vague knowledge that whatever he sees here is very important, but that there is something he is waiting for; something that is the _most_ important.   
  
As the last lines from Marc Antony's speech to the Roman people slip away, he feels suddenly prepared.  
  
Words appear but they are garbled, only nouns surface forward but they have no meaning. The pacing is obvious, he feels that it's almost familiar. But it is so unclear.   
  
Suddenly the words focus and he is startled by how bright and luminous they are.   
  
_No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do. To swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool. Deferential, glad to be of use, politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— almost, at times, the Fool._  
  
He grabs at the last two words and wrenches them from the air, pulling them close and examining them.   
  
The Fool.   
  
They dissolve into stars under his feet and he is falling through space. He can not remember how to scream, but he is as unafraid as the shepherds in the meadow when they were heralded by the angel when Christ was born.   
  
He wakes up.  
  
****


	9. Beautiful, Surprising, And Deep

"Hey.. hey you awake?"   
  
McCoy cracks one eye open and a blur is speaking to him in James T. Kirk's voice.   
  
"Ain't this jus' fittin'," he growls, voice still harsh even to his own ears and he can see a hint of a smile stretch the features of James T. Kirk's blur.  
  
"You've been out for awhile."   
  
(If McCoy had better control over his senses he might recognize the fluctuation in voice control that James T. Kirk is exhibiting. A slight change in pitch to denote tension, worry.)  
  
"Captain' I hear I-"  
  
" _Jim_."   
  
The word is stressed and this is when Jim comes into focus. McCoy reaches up and presses his hand to his forehead, rubbing at the wrinkles in his own brow he squints at Jim.  
  
" _Jim_ ," he starts over, using the supplied nomination to avoid a fight and because he likes the way it sounds on his tongue when he emphasizes the consonants, "I hear I've been relieved from active duty... I know I'm sufferin' a mild concussion bu-"  
  
Jim interupts, "and your knee."  
  
McCoy pauses and frowns, "and my knee what?"   
  
Jim points to where McCoy assumes his knee is, "your _knee_. You tore the tendons and ligaments in it." The words are rehearsed as if they are something he has had to be told many times as well.   
  
Christine Chapel appears in the doorway just as McCoy is regaining his voice and vitriol.   
  
"Don't even think about moving from that bed."   
  
McCoy scoffs, "Apparently I _can't_ \- what do you people mean I tore the tendons and ligaments in my knee?"   
  
" _Apparently_ ," (emphasis as mocking), "you thought running through the halls was a good idea in the middle of an attack." Christine leans against the doorframe in a know-it-all way that makes McCoy boil a little.  
  
"Everyone was running through the damn hall!"   
  
"Yes but you are of a certain age-"  
  
"I am not _old_ , woman!"   
  
Christine is well adjusted to a Dr. McCoy who seems more venomous than he is. She, however, realizes that she has the upper hand in this argument as the good doctor is relegated to a bed. She looks overly pleased with herself.  
  
"You are of a _certain age_ where running in the halls can lead to injury - besides, you've _apparently_ hurt that knee before and it wasn't in your medical record but during the examination-"   
  
McCoy fumes, "Now you look here-"  
  
" _You_ look here," she cuts him off and uses her most authoritative Nurse Voice to quell his arguments,"You are under my supervision and whatever I say the other attending signs off on. And since I know you, unfortunately, very well, I'm confining you to a wheelch-"  
  
"OH COME ON."   
  
Jim hides a smile behind his steepled fingers, enjoying the exchange, and just shrugs when McCoy looks at him for support. Christine points at him with the hypospray and narrows her eyes, "we dock tomorrow. I'll have your _wheelchair_ ready for your discharge."   
  
Without another word, she turns on her heel and leaves. The curtain swishes closed behind her and McCoy growls in her wake, "Balls to this Christine! I'll put you on triage for a month when I get back!"  
  
"That's a hell of a way to speak to a lady," Jim smirks.   
  
"Shut your damn mouth, Jim," McCoy falls back into the bed, "she's no lady, she's a nurse; they're a special kind of bitch."   
  
Jim snorts.   
  
"I don't know what you think is so damn funny."   
  
"You."  
  
McCoy scoffs,"Your face is about to be funny."   
  
"I think I like you a little high on pain killers," Jim laughs and stands up from the chair and plants himself on the biobed next to McCoy. "Ooooh Bones..." he shakes his head and offers McCoy a soft smile, "I think you'll look good in a wheelchair."   
  
"Oh fuck _off_ ," McCoy grumbles, "I jus' want you ta'know this is bullshit."   
  
"oh?"   
  
"My knee. It's bullshit."   
  
Jim smiles and wonders how much medication McCoy is on, wonders if he'll remember anything about this tomorrow, "Christine said you won't be out of commission too long, just long enough to really make you a burden on her patience."   
  
"She _would_ say that."   
  
McCoy shifts his weight until he's sitting up, only to realize he doesn't want to sit up because it makes his head hurt. He sees stars blossom at the edges of his vision and he closes his eyes against them only to have them burst behind his eyelids.   
  
He groans and Jim, concerned, moves in closer, "Bones?" His voice is quiet and McCoy hears how young and unsure he is even inside of just one word.   
  
Bones. The Fool.   
  
He can't find the word he wants to use to answer with and he realizes it is a side effect of the concussion. He is bound in a frustrating silence where his head feels muffled and anything he thinks has to somehow navigate through the fog.   
  
"M'fine."   
  
Jim is close suddenly, and McCoy senses the hand before he feels it. Jim strokes over his jaw and his neck and absently pauses to feel the steady pulse under his fingertips.   
  
"If you're fine, open your eyes." The tone has changed, and the tenuous line of fear is gone, replaced by a more authoritative note. McCoy looks at Jim and he's tired. He's tired, he's sore, his head is fuzzy and Jim is balancing precariously close. Too close.   
  
"You're a real asshole y'know that," McCoy's voice is low and rough but Jim is aware, has known him long enough to know when McCoy means it and when McCoy is just saying it. Today McCoy is just saying it and Jim gives him a haphazard smile.   
  
"Yeah, I know."   
  
McCoy tries to make Jim's features focus in front of him but they won't come. Instead Jim seems to waver there and McCoy closes his eyes again. This time Jim doesn't ask him to open them, he just leans in close until their foreheads touch and listens to McCoy breathe.   
  
There are things that go unsaid. Words that, like in McCoy's dream, hover just out of range. They never make it close enough to catch onto but maybe they don't really need them. Maybe what matters is that they can be this close and when Jim breathes out McCoy breathes in what it is he really means. Jim's thumb brushes over McCoy's bottom lip and there exists so little space between them they may as well be kissing, but Jim doesn't want it to be like this.   
  
Despite the times he's kissed McCoy when he's sleeping he tells himself that part of them is over. The part where they tell each other everything when they know they can pretend to forget it later.   
  
He isn't sure how long they stay there like that. Sitting up in bed and inhaling the ends of the others' exhalations.   
  
When Jim draws back he is surprised at the hand that reaches up and wraps into the front of his shirt.   
  
They do not speak, but they hear the words that go unsaid.   
  
Their noses touch and Jim smiles, licking over his lips, maybe even purposely letting his tongue flick out over McCoy's. There is a sound outside the door and Jim draws back as McCoy's hand falls back to the blanket.   
  
"I think it's your bedtime," Jim smirks and they fall into a routine of abrasive humor.   
  
McCoy's voice is rough when he answers, "fuck you very much, Jim."   
  
"Anytime."   
  
Jim gives up on the pretense of personal space and slides the rest of the way onto the bed, crowding McCoy over and stretching out next to him amidst complaints and small, unlasting arguments.   
  
This is where the tone of their friendship begins to alter. The platonic fabric that had once made up their encounters and moments together has been ripped at the seams. They have begun to sew it together instead with something stronger.   
  
Nurse Chapel appears with a hypospray and Jim comments about how gratifying it is to see McCoy getting a taste of his own medicine. He is patient and still while Chapel works on McCoy, flirting with her shamelessly despite the fact that she has long since become immune to it. When she leaves Jim trades snide commentary with McCoy and no one else is there to see the way his fingers wrap almost protectively around McCoy's arm.  
  
But for all the talk, all the masked happiness, there is something dark that coils in Jim's stomach. It is guilt and unrest. When McCoy drops back off to sleep, Jim is left with only the guilt there to keep him company. He thinks that if it were not for him McCoy would not be in this bed; he thinks that if things had happened only a split second differently McCoy might not be here at all.  
  
Jim rolls onto his side, watching the steady rise and fall of McCoy's chest. He has a mission to protect a lot of people as the Unlikely Captain of Starfleet's Flagship, but the Argument on the bed with him is the one he cares most about.  
  
****


	10. Father forgive them for they know not what they do

This is the scene.   
  
If asked, McCoy would not be able to name the Act as he is sure They (himself and James T. Kirk; capitalized as to define and clarify their new status) are several in at this point. What matters most is that They have come to this point through mutual dissatisfaction with their Relationship and what it _was_. They currently _are_ (an extension of the active "is" which defines James T. Kirk [though in this case, the active parties are plural, thus admitting that the two are joined]).  
  
James T. Kirk is pushing McCoy through the Enterprise as they disembark from the ship during repairs at base. There have been preparations to keep them busy up until this point, McCoy was trying to be a gracious patient, but this was McCoy - he could only do gracious for so long. James T. Kirk relieved the person assigned to assist McCoy and did it himself because he knew if anyone else was left alone with McCoy they wouldn't survive long enough to accomplish anything. Aside from their usual conversation they haven't spoken much since the day before in sickbay.   
  
This explains why McCoy is startled when James T. Kirk hits the stop button in the turbolift creating a traffic jam for the better part of half an hour.   
  
"Sorry, Bones."   
  
The tone is difficult to decipher. McCoy is still struggling through the dregs of a concussion and reads the words as two things: genuine though somehow sad.   
  
There's a long pause where they both look straight ahead at the wall panel and don't say anything until Jim breaks the silence. He leans against McCoy's wheelchair, arms folded. He's so close that when he talks, McCoy can feel his breath.   
  
"Ever feel like this is some ... elaborate exercise back in cadet training?"   
  
McCoy's mouth works but he doesn't know what to say. He wishes that he were at least standing so he could pretend he had presence but that is something he is without. He finds in this situation that he cannot force himself to appear authoritative with stature and poise, he has nothing but his words.   
  
He examines them in his mind but they jumble together like letters in a crossword puzzle.   
  
"Like maybe we'll wake up and no one will be dead, they'll just be beamed back to the rendezvous point and we'll all go out for drinks afterwards."   
  
There is time to breathe and McCoy looks up at the lighting overhead and knows Death. He works alongside Death; as a Doctor they're almost on friendly terms, yet they still manage a civil sense of separation. If they avoid seeing one another they are more than fine; though Death does knock when it is most inconvenient, that is what McCoy knows for certain.  
  
This is what makes it so hard for Jim. Because despite his circumstances he has not worked side-along with Death.   
  
He is only now coming to know this new bedfellow and his insidious demands.   
  
McCoy finds words in the silence and speaks with authority, "So this is about the people you lost."   
  
"Yeah and-" he pauses and McCoy can see in his peripheral vision Jim shaking his head, "it's not _just_ that. But it is part of the -" gestures instead of words. Supposedly actions speak louder; McCoy thinks maybe the waiving of Jim's arm is his idea of filling in the blank and he accepts it.  
  
There is silence again in the turbolift and McCoy bites on the inside of his cheek, thinking hard about what he would want someone to say to him. He's no molly-coddling woman, but Ja-- _Jim_ needs reasoning and reassurance more than he needs gruff disposition and angry back-and forth witticism.   
  
"Well it's... it's a risk you take, joinin' starfleet. We're a peace keepin' initiative but you know better than anyone keepin' peace sometimes means breakin' the peace."   
  
McCoy's voice is soft and his southern drawl is more pronounced. Jim nods understanding and leans further forward. His head is almost touching McCoy's shoulder.   
  
"I thought it was bad enough in school, but now... I'd rather get marked down a few points on a test than deal with funerals and memorials and speeches."   
  
It is McCoy's turn to nod and he does so, leaning to one side of his wheelchair, supporting himself on the arm. He stares down at the floor this time, as if summoning up an answer or just words to make Jim's guilt ease.   
  
Jim continues: "Think it's a maturity thing? Maybe the longer I do this the easier it'll get?"   
  
McCoy speaks before he thinks: "Would you want it to get easier?" There is accusation in the tone, but well-founded accusation, accusation born of experience. Jim's blood runs cold.  
  
"I guess if it got easier it would mean I wasn't taking human life seriously enough."   
  
This is a point, of course, that McCoy has lectured him on before, and part of him wants to feel satisfied and smug that he finally got through to Jim, but he can only think of how hard the lesson is and how he wishes Jim never had to learn it to begin with. How no one should have to learn it.  
  
"I can only assume..." McCoy looks back down at the floor as Jim shifts behind him. He tries to ignore the fact that he can hear Jim breathing and it's too close and too heavy. He has to try even harder to ignore the fingers that tug and play with the collar of his shirt.   
  
"Bones?"   
  
McCoy turns his head and Jim is there, too close, too heavy, too real and McCoy wishes he could at least be eye level with him, not this ridiculous chair-bound bullshit. His mouth feels dry and he looks away because sometimes it's too much to look Jim in the eyes.   
  
"You don't owe me any apologies, kid," McCoy grumbles and his hands are tight on the arms of the wheel chair.   
  
Jim pulls at the collar of McCoy's shirt, and McCoy knows what's happening before it occurs. Jim kisses him.   
  
It's soft and careful, as if for once in his life Jim doesn't know what he's doing and when his lips are sliding against McCoy's, McCoy thinks about books. He thinks about Hemingway and the ocean. He thinks about the marlin and the sharks. Of respect and human compassion.   
  
_I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things._  
  
Is it like all 20th century literature? Where everything is a symbol for some greater theme or purpose; if so then he is the Old Man and Jim is the Marlin. He fights him so much he falls in love and in the darkest night he loses him to predators because he's let himself be pulled out too far.   
  
McCoy reaches up with one hand and tightens his hand at the back of Jim's neck and holds him, kissing him back hard as if trying to explain that he's a Marlin. That he's beautiful that he is reknowned and powerful. Powerful enough to drag Leonard Horatio McCoy into the deepest depths of space; away from land and home and comfort.   
  
He hopes that Jim realizes he'll keep him safe, and that when he brings him home he'll be in one piece. Barring that, he will die being dragged out into the vast _nothing_ that space is. Keeping Jim complete, always admiring, respecting.  
  
He hopes that neither has to die to realize their worth together. He thinks that there's a lot to say, a lot to think and then he realizes that maybe that is what this kiss is for: To say the words they can't quite reach. The words that are always hovering there but never make it out.   
  
McCoy, who needs to say more, reaches his free hand up and fists it in the front of Jim's gold command shirt, forcing him in closer and making a low sound in the back of his throat. He may be confined to this stupid chair out of fear of Christine Chapel, but he will be damned before he gets pushed around by One, James T. Kirk.   
  
The lift shudders to life suddenly and instead of pulling away, Jim grabs tighter and deepens the kiss. McCoy's fingers slide to tighten in his hair and then there is desperation. A small sound signals that the doors are opening and they pull away in time to keep up appearances.   
  
Spock is standing in the doorway. McCoy has his head down, looking at his knees and trying to discretely wipe his mouth. Jim is standing to one side of him and looks like he's attempting to fiddle with the turbolift controls. He licks his lips.  
  
McCoy watches and realizes he can still taste Jim in his mouth.  
  
"Captain, Dr. McCoy." Spock's voice is neutral, but he raises an eyebrow and McCoy swears he knows something.   
  
****


	11. I don't know what I can save you from

James T. Kirk put himself down as McCoy's on base roommate.   
  
McCoy attempts to dissuade him from the idea and James T. Kirk insists that it is too late to change the sleeping arrangements. He shrugs, gives McCoy a look that says too many things at one time and McCoy growls in a consenting sort of way.   
  
(The nuances of his non-verbal vocabulary are wasted on most people.)  
  
(However, _Jim_ is fluent. He knows at exactly what pitch and tone every single sound means.)  
  
(For example: He knows now that McCoy is begrudingly happy.)   
  
_Their_ room is situated near the other crew members' and McCoy isn't sure he likes the idea but he goes with it amidst minor arguments.   
  
The space is minimalist, neat, clean and sterile. It reminds McCoy forcefully of sickbay and he can't quite decide if that is a positive or negative virtue. Two beds are separated by a nightstand and McCoy knows there is no Bible, but he thinks of it all the same.   
  
Jim nudges him forward and as soon as he turns his back to pull their bags in McCoy is pushing himself out of the wheelchair. Jim attempts to coax him back into it but McCoy limps to the bed closest and plants himself there, propping his knee up on an extra pillow.   
  
Jim shuffles the luggage around and an awkward silence descends when he joins McCoy on the bed.   
  
"You have your _own_ bed," McCoy points out more for his own benefit than Jim's since Jim is apparently content to squeeze himself onto McCoy's.   
  
"Yeah but then I'd be a whole, what? Three feet away? Who knows what kind of trouble you'll manage to get yourself into."   
  
Jim kicks his boots off the side of the bed and stretches out, relaxed. McCoy is tense enough for the both of them.   
  
"I'm pretty capable of managing without you in my breathin' space."   
  
His words don't have any venom, they just sound tired. Maybe nervous. They both think about what happened in the turbolift but neither one can think of what to say about it.   
  
But even without words, the tension remains. The lights in the room are bright and everything is laid bare. McCoy feels like he is under an x-ray, that everything he might be thinking or feeling is going to be suddenly known.   
  
"Lights at fifty percent."   
  
The room dims and McCoy looks up at the ceiling. He thinks of sunsets even though they're meant for death. The room has a low, warm glow and in this quiet, unguarded space, he is no longer CMO, or Doctor, or anything but just 'Bones'.   
  
Jim slides over until he is close enough for McCoy to throw an arm over his shoulders. When Jim speaks his voice is pulled taught as if he's been holding onto the words for too long.  
  
"In the lift --" he shifts uncomfortably and McCoy turns his head enough to watch him, fixing him under his stare, "it isn't who I lost, well it is, but it's about who I could have lost."   
  
Jim meets McCoy's look and what McCoy wants to say is there between them. McCoy wants to tell him about the true value of the words 'what if' because those two words have redefined their lives in a profound way that neither can fully grasp. Only Ambassador Spock seems to know their worth. That is a conversation for another day and McCoy just looks at Jim and thinks very hard about what it is he wishes Jim knew about him. About how he feels. Maybe it doesn't need to be verbalized. Maybe they just know. McCoy shrugs his shoulders and lets his arm drop from around Jim.  
  
"Yeah but you didn't because you're the child prodigy over here holdin' all the aces."  
  
Jim exhales a laugh, his head dropping back against the headboard, "Aces are great, but you need a royal flush to win."   
  
McCoy rolls his eyes and lets all of his weight sink into the pillows.   
  
He sighs and nudges Jim in the ribs with his elbow, "hand me the damn pill I'm being forced to take will ya? If you're gonna be here ya-"  
  
"-blah blah make myself useful," Jim cuts McCoy off and gives him a cocky grin.  
  
When he gets off the bed he doesn't see the way McCoy's eyes follow him until he returns to sit on the edge again, waiting for McCoy to get the pill down.   
  
They sit in silence again and McCoy blinks slowly before his head starts to swim and thinking becomes a grey area where he can no longer navigate. He starts to say something but is interrupted by the muffled sound of the communicator. He watches Jim stand up to answer it, and tries to wait for him to finish the call but whatever he had to say is gone as soon as his eyes fall closed.   
  
He slips in and out of a dreamless sleep.   
  
The first time he wakes up, Jim is in an arm chair across the room, lights on, reading his PADD. McCoy doesn't move, just watches him, feeling nervous energy twist in his stomach. Some kind of flirting affection with the scene makes him half smile. He slides his hand over the bed and Jim glances up over the PADD at the movement.   
  
"Bones."   
  
It is soft, warm. He smiles back.  
  
It makes McCoy ache.   
  
"You okay?"   
  
McCoy's chest feels tight and he nods, then shrugs as if indecisive. "Jus'stretchin,'" is his clarification.  
  
He hears the chuckle at the slurred and conjoined words and can't muster a snide reply. He thinks he's okay with that and the room is gone around him.   
  
The second time he only remembers waking up because the room is dark now and Jim is on the bed with him. He feels Jim's fingers in his hair and he hears words whispered close to his ear.   
  
He _thinks_ that he has heard them before but what he _knows_ is that he isn't supposed to have heard them at all. He breathes in and catches the tail end of some true statement, "...am I in your dreams? I'd like to know..."  
  
When McCoy breathes back out, he can almost taste him.   
  
****  
  
Their lives turn over to a strange routine for a spell. With the Enterprise docked for two weeks of repairs, the crew is dismissed for a week long leave. Some are taking the time to heal, some are going home to be with family, some are being laid to rest.  
  
James T. Kirk oversees days of repairs, he assists in arrangements for those that died, he comes back to the room and lets McCoy grouch at him about being confined to a 'cardboard box.' They lay on a cramped bed together and watch tv and James T. Kirk talks about the repairs, the arrangements and Leonard H. McCoy stops grouching for long enough to listen.   
  
McCoy works his way out of the wheelchair and gets upgraded to crutches. For all his distrust of modern medicine, he will at least allow it this: he would rather suffer a few weeks than six months to a year. (He has read about these injuries from the 20th century - with casts and 'orthoscopic' surgery and brutal methods involving cutting and _sewing_ together human flesh.)   
  
He has managed his way around the base, at least around the crew's quarters. He engaged Spock in a game or two of chess at which he failed miserably. He has done what work he can, even though he is considered off active duty.   
  
When James T. Kirk has filed reports, talked to the Admirals, overseen all that he can oversee he books a shuttle and packs their bags and tells McCoy they are going to Georgia. They have a week.   
  
When McCoy hears it he is unsure if what James T. Kirk is laying out is a gift or an ultimatum. One week.   
  
****


	12. All men kill the thing they love

When David McCoy passed away, he had left a great many things behind. There were all of his affairs that had stretched his lifetime waiting to be settled, on top of that the personal items and least of all the emotional anguish he'd left in full to his son.   
  
So when McCoy thinks about his father, he has a great deal of regret. He never thinks that it was his father who wasn't strong enough to hold on, he thinks that _he_ was the one lacking strength. If he had held out just three more weeks, if he had not given into his father's addled requests then maybe... maybe.   
  
McCoy is a person who does not do ambiguity well. He is straight forward. Sometimes he hides what he thinks or feels but he doesn't try and make it into a grey area. He at least has the decency to just shift gears into either black or white.   
  
He stands on the front porch of this lean-to old farmhouse and it has David McCoy written all over it. Which is why he thinks, when staring at the door to his childhood home, that everything right now is a little _too_ black and white. This is the dark past and the bright future is almost blinding next to him. The bright future is also nudging him forward with a sure hand against his lower back and saying things like _'archaic'_ and _'rustic'_ and _'dark ages'_.   
  
At least they are on the same page.   
  
"You're gonna have t'get the key - it's under that rock there."   
  
McCoy motions with his crutch to the rock in question and Jim ferrets out a dirty key in the waning light, bringing it back and fitting it into the lock. It doesn't give right away and he frowns at it.   
  
"Have t'jiggle it around a little, the lock's older th-"   
  
Click.   
  
It gives and Jim lets the door swing wide. He tries to contain the curiosity that boils upwards, all he wants to do is walk in and explore. The place looks close to delapidated but McCoy swears it's not. Says it's just old, it's been in the family for a couple hundred years - renovated a number of times. No one lives there now, but the family still uses it as a kind of a getaway.   
  
"--guess the cousins still use it as a hunting camp in the fall and 'round about now we used to use it as a summer place. There's a lake not too far from here, used to ride down to it..." McCoy trails off as he crosses the threshold and Jim follows him in.   
  
The floorboards creak in the foyer and mix with the strange click that the crutches make when McCoy leans his weight against them.   
  
Jim is stunted there, just inside the door, looking around as if the air he breathes has been stolen out. Ghosts haunt this place, he can feel them fluttering in and out of the many rooms. McCoy seems impervious to them, but Jim, who died as he was born seems overly sensitive to their presence. They are not real ghosts, they are the past selves of Leonard Horatio McCoy.   
  
He can hear McCoy talking from the kitchen, he is opening and closing drawers and cursing intermittently.   
  
"I'll get the bags--" Jim calls into the empty house and gets a responding incoherent call from McCoy which he assumes means 'ok'.   
  
When he returns McCoy is limping around without any assistance.  
  
"Crutches?"   
  
McCoy shrugs and sets a lantern on the table, switching it on, sending the living room into strange relief around them, "I don't see Christine Chapel anywhere in this house so I don't see fit to use 'em."   
  
"Suit yourself, but I'm not gonna answer for you when we get back to the Enterprise."   
  
"I got a whole week of vacation you aren't gonna ruin it playin' doctor."   
  
"Hey, now that's an idea."   
  
Jim gives McCoy a suggestive look as he tosses the bags into a corner and McCoy frowns at him. "No."   
  
"Where are the lights?"   
  
"Out, I notified them, they said there's a storm in the area, it'll take a couple of hours to get us reconnected."   
  
"You really do live in the middle of nowhere."   
  
"I _live_ on a space ship, I am _visiting_ in the middle of nowhere because my captain is a glutton for punishment."   
  
"You say that like it's a bad thing."  
  
"It is, Jim. It _is_."   
  
McCoy slumps onto the nearest couch and puts his foot up on the coffee table. With nothing but the lantern for light the room seems overly big cast mostly in shadow. Jim flops down next to McCoy and grins, "you should tell me about growing up here."   
  
"No I-"  
  
Jim interupts, "I think you should tell me all the embarrassing stories about when you were growing up."   
  
"No it-"  
  
"-I think it's a good idea."   
  
His enthusiasm is stifling. McCoy looks skyward asking God for patience and sighs, closing his eyes.   
  
"I usually spent my summers here with my family. My cousins would come in and we were all around the same age give or take a handful of years and we'd just run wild 'round the place."   
  
McCoy tilts his head forward as Jim stretches over his lap.  
  
"Oh no, keep going."   
  
"I'm a doctor Jim, not a storyteller."   
  
"You can be both. I have faith in you." Jim gives him a cocky smile and McCoy can only roll his eyes and wait for him to settle.   
  
"I don't know which parts to tell you."   
  
"Everything?"   
  
Everything is a tall order, mostly because McCoy isn't sure what there is to remember. All the things he remembers from growing up here all lead back to his father which is something he doesn't want to remember. He finally starts telling Jim about summers with his cousins, about horseback riding, swinging off the rope into the lake, about camping in the back pasture or telling ghost stories in the barn loft. He tries to refocus the details in his mind but thinks sometimes the obscurity is better.   
  
McCoy just talks. Picks a story and runs with it.   
  
He talks until the low hum of electricity circuits through the house. Then he stops talking and turns off the lantern on the table and moves to stand up so he can switch on the lamp.   
  
Jim sits up as though he might allow it and then presses a hand against McCoy's thigh, "this is good."   
  
"It's pitch black."  
  
"I know."  
  
His voice is low and McCoy can see him in the ambient light from outside. When lightning strikes nearby his features are sharper, more defined. Jim pushes McCoy back into the couch and kisses at the corner of his mouth.   
  
"You tired?"   
  
"Yeah, travelin' always... always burns me out."   
  
McCoy's voice is rough even to his own ears and he doesn't know why they're sitting in the dark and why Jim barely kissed him and is touching his thigh.   
  
"Do you need to go to bed?"   
  
Jim's asking at the same time that he's sliding a hand up under McCoy's shirt and McCoy thinks this might just be completely insane.   
  
His face feels hot and he's exhausted but the concern that Jim is voicing doesn't match what he's really asking.   
  
"Bed?" Jim asks again, only this time he's leaning in close and breathing it out against McCoy's ear and he isn't asking about the bed, he's saying it but his mouth is working closer to McCoy's and all McCoy can think of is how Jim tasted in the elevator.   
  
"M'good right here," McCoy mumbles and reaches out to drag Jim closer, meeting him somewhere in the middle and trying to make his mind go blank because this is what he wants to remember. Not stories about his youth or about a life that he burned a bridge to the day he signed divorce papers and got the hell out. Despite the fact that little remains physically to represent his past, the space is crowded too close with memories and thoughts and the tail ends of conversations that never got picked up. He doesn't want any of that. He doesn't want this house to hurt as much as it does.   
  
Jim is half on him and McCoy isn't really stopping him, if anything he's probably encouraging the bastard. Not that he regrets it; Jim manages to still taste like mint despite travelling all day, and he's a little more active than he was in the lift. He kisses with purpose and his hand has McCoy's shirt hitched up around his chest and McCoy fumbles a little. It's been awhile and he's unsure of what it is he wants to do or what he _should_ do.  
  
Then Jim is cutting into his thoughts, pulling their mouths apart for long enough to order McCoy around (something which McCoy shouldn't be surprised about, circumstances given what they are), "Bones, c'mon just touch me." He isn't desperate. McCoy knows what desperate sounds like on Jim Kirk and that's not it. It's something else.   
  
So his fingers go up Jim's back and he counts vertebrae in time with breathing. McCoy isn't sure where this is going. He doesn't know when he's supposed to call time out or stop but at some point when he thinks his lips might be numb, he realizes he doesn't care. This is it. This is what he wants to remember: Jim trying to get to second base on the couch with him while he's injured because that's something tactile and happy and not a huge regret.   
  
He likes that they're rebuilding this house from the ground up. There's already foundations here, but they're improving upon them. Sweeping out the cobwebs that hold up progress and pulling the curtains and blinds to let the light in.   
  
****


	13. Talented and Bright; Lonely and Uptight

This trip is about Jim. Not because McCoy fails to be important at this point, or in this house but because McCoy knows himself. He has studied himself, analyzed himself and of course been himself since the day he was born. He is well aware of his past, his present and sometimes he thinks he is aware of his future though Jim makes that difficult sometimes.   
  
But being about Jim, it is also about McCoy. In the sense that it is about Jim, it really is about Jim and his discovering McCoy; what McCoy currently is, and what he _was_.   
  
Jim has a strange collection of memories and stories and ideas that make up his version of McCoy. For Jim, this house is only a story. It exists only in McCoy's memories and is a place that he has associated with hurt for too long.   
  
They sleep on the couch their first night and Jim wonders, upon waking, if they will always wake up fully clothed in uncomfortable, cramped positions. He hopes not, though it is a current trend.  
  
Jim is up before McCoy and he peels himself off the couch, leaving McCoy to sleep through the morning. The house is light enough for him to find his way without turning on the lamp, but he has to be careful of where he steps. Certain boards creak and shift under his weight and he smiles to himself at he navigates historical property and considers the ramification of McCoy as a young man going through these same motions.   
  
He skips the kitchen, opting for food later and instead he leans against the frame of the open back door and watches the sun rise above the tree line. He thinks this is insane.   
  
He thinks that _he_ is insane.   
  
When he booked the shuttle he was thinking of taking McCoy _home_. That maybe something familiar would be good for him; that this place would be enough to dampen the sense of obligation to work that McCoy had when he was within a seventy-five mile radius of the Enterprise. He wanted this to be time for _them_.   
  
He isn't sure about what _"them"_ means, only that he refers to himself in the plural sense now and it's not because his ego has finally outsized itself and become an entity on it's own. It is because of McCoy. (McCoy who, in his fully conscious mind, believes he is only a handful of unflattering adjectives. In this state he will not take responsibility for the things he really is at heart. He insists that he is abrasive, angry, belligerent grumpy and old fashioned. It is Jim who has to fill in how he is caring, courageous, defined, elegant, forgiving, gracious and intelligent. [Because alphabetical order is important to doctors.] He never voices this, but he hopes in some way that the physicality they're exploring is making the fact known.)  
  
When McCoy stirs on the couch, Jim tucks himself back into the house as if he belongs there, as if it were made for him. When the truth is that he could not feel more out of place.   
  
McCoy is stretching himself awake, rubbing in places that are overly stiff.   
  
He catches Jim watching him and gives him an annoyed look.   
  
Jim smiles. McCoy grumbles.   
  
"On the couch. Really?"  
  
"It took too long to get to the bed."   
  
"I'm too old to sleep on the damn couch, Jim!"   
  
"Well it kept your leg elevated - like you're supposed to do."   
  
"I could've elevated it in bed and then my damn spine wouldn't feel like it's kinked in eight different directions ya little shit."   
  
"You always this venomous before coffee-"  
  
McCoy's mouth opens and Jim cuts him off.   
  
"-wait I can answer that. _Yes_."   
  
McCoy's mouth shuts.   
  
"Coffee?"   
  
Jim moves to help McCoy up and their voices are quiet amidst the hum of Old House Sounds that occupy the background. McCoy argues about how he does not need assistance to the bathroom and no he does not need his crutches either Jim Kirk, go make yourself useful. Jim laughs and creates innuendo even at 7am, something which McCoy scoffs at, but without which he would feel bereft.  
  
****  
  
He reappears in the kitchen where Jim is fighting with a prehistoric coffee maker. He would help, but it's more fun to watch the struggle. He leans against the doorframe for support and thinks the real struggle is Jim trying to assert himself into this space, McCoy's past.   
  
The incongruity of these lives feels oddly meshed together with Jim standing in the middle of a renovated old kitchen trying to coax an appliance to do his bidding. Dark past, meet bright future. He's tenacious, be careful.   
  
"Why don't _you_ make yourself useful." Jim breaks into McCoy's thoughts and motions to the coffee maker.   
  
"I always have to get you out of every tight spot, don't I?" McCoy limps in and budges Jim over, working his magic, something he calls patience, to get the coffee maker running. When he turns to smirk at Jim in a satisfied 'I won' way, Jim is already there, chin on McCoy's shoulder.   
  
In this moment McCoy feels like he's ten years younger and dumber and inexperienced. His stomach seems to float up to his throat and Jim just keeps staring at him. It would be unnerving if it were anyone else; instead it's a frightening sort of turn on.   
  
He is starting to think he's too keyed up from all this travel and medication and the injury but the truth is it's all Jim.   
  
Jim, with his warm breath and completely invasive personality. McCoy can tell that he's smirking now, mostly because Jim's mouth is pressed into the side of his neck and he's sensitive there and he has a dark, sneaking suspicion that Jim has now figured that out.   
  
McCoy can feel Jim's mouth moving, and it takes him a minute to realize that Jim is _talking_. But there is no sound, there are no words. McCoy tilts his head to one side as if considering and Jim stretches against his back and God, his stubble tickles a little and McCoy has to hold himself up against the counter; Knuckles white against the edge.   
  
And then Jim is reaching around and his hands are next to McCoy's. He stares straight ahead at the cabinet and tries to think calming thoughts. But instead all he can come up with is that Jim fits against him in a kind of obscene way. And that every time he breathes in or breathes out he's creating a light friction between them.   
  
So He tilts his head back and Jim makes a noise in his throat and McCoy thinks he might be imagining it, until the point when Jim moves onto his toes just enough to _rub_ against him and then he realizes no. He isn't imagining it.   
  
"Good morning," is mumbled into his jaw and a wet, hot tongue punctuates the ending. McCoy breathes in and it hitches in his throat, something which makes Jim chuckle and press into him again.   
  
He wonders why this simple touch, this proximity, feels more intrusive than having Jim half on top of him with his hands everywhere like last night. Because that defined the word intrusive. But this? This is making his face heat up and his mind short circuit and his brain is firing this primal urge to just shove Jim into the wall or something and McCoy can't take losing his cool like this. He's a doctor, he makes deals and trades with fact and finite. He knows romance and emotion and love and reason and he knows that all of those things rarely make sense but make someone human. So then he's human, in that kitchen, with Jim against him.   
  
And there are _no words_ ; yet so many things are being said inside that two minute frame of _life_.   
  
They are human, and they're talking in actions.   
  
The coffee machine bleats sadly at them and McCoy pulls away with a stumble. He is reaching for a mug and unsteadily filling it and sipping it black and trying to reassemble his whole person from the ground up.  
  
Jim laughs in a quiet, breathy way and pats him on the shoulder, "you seem a little tense there, Bones."   
  
"Shove it, Jim," McCoy says it and the words are dragged out from some low point, gravelly and unmistakeably turned on. He wishes he were better at hiding that sort of thing. But he settles for his hand in life and in turn _they_ settle back into a routine they know. One with griping, snide commentating and cajoling. (Present participles, McCoy likes those.)   
  
****


	14. By a love so much refined, that ourselves know not what it is

They started in the attic.   
  
Because Jim insists that everything of interest exists in those types of places. McCoy knows exactly what exists in those places as well, and he knows just what's in this particular attic and knows better than to allow Jim up there to explore.   
  
Unfortunately with a bad knee he doesn't have the physical capacity to make good on all fifteen of the threats he made.   
  
McCoy is leaning against the wall in the hallway, staring up into the dark void that represents the past. He can hear Jim moving around the crossbeams and occasionally hears a muffled exclamation of discovery.   
  
There are already a stack of boxes next to McCoy which Jim has banned him from opening until he's there to witness it, and McCoy is honoring that request for whatever reason.   
  
He thinks it's not worth the argument which is something he hasn't thought in a very long time.   
  
He blames Jim.   
  
And almost as if thinking his name is a summons, there Jim is, descending the rickety stairs, and balancing yet another box with him.   
  
McCoy is only paying a half-assed amount of attention to the proceeding until he notices something different. His mind speeds up and slows down simultaneously and he reflects somewhere in some far away corner that it can't be possible for that to happen.   
  
Yet it's happening. His mind works overtime, processing responses and yet the scene in front of him warps and grinds to a near halt.   
  
It's so simple though.   
  
Jim.   
  
Jim's been wearing a black shirt. All day. He showered and he came out in a black shirt. A black shirt with blue jeans and that is not a black shirt. That shirt he is wearing right now. That shirt is grey. That shirt is _heather grey_. It has black lettering and the number 44.   
  
It says 'McCOY' across the shoulders, and it stretches just slightly to accomodate an adult frame.   
  
Jim looks smug at his discovery. McCoy is lost in some mental cavern that is littered with bad ideas. His mouth is dry and he fishes blindly for a comeback.   
  
"I like that you have no respect for personal property - not that I'm surprised."  
  
Jim laughs, "I can take it off if you want."   
  
But the way he says it and the way his fingers wrap into the hem and the way he looks McCoy in the eyes isn't apologetic and contrite. It's a challenge.  
  
In the end it's not even that McCoy cares that Jim is wearing the shirt - it's just a shirt. It's about the fact that _Jim_ is wearing _his_ shirt.  
  
It makes his insides do some kind of tap dance and suddenly there's that surge of nervous energy that he'd had laying awake in the room on base and he wonders if this is a kind of mania. If what he is feeling for Jim is some kind of disease and not affection. Because he's being reduced to a frenzy inside at him simply being close and medically speaking there is _nothing_ for that. There is no hypospray for _giddy school girl_.   
  
He reaches out and wraps his hand around the back of Jim's neck and drags him in only stops just short.   
  
He thinks this is a lot like high school suddenly because he hasn't felt this sort of wild urge overtake him since he was at least seventeen and could get it up on command with just a look from the right person. Not that he can't get it up now because he can and it's _getting_ there and that worries him because this is Jim. This is _his_ Jim. His _Captain_ , his best friend, his enthusiastic drinking buddy, his occasional manly crying shoulder, his patient, his _everything_.   
  
And that's what breaks him.   
  
That Jim has managed to insinuate himself so permanently into McCoy's life that McCoy can't actually function properly without him, and that he had no idea it had even been happening.   
  
He takes a shuddering breath and Jim's hands are suddenly on the wall on either side of McCoy's head and he's all intensity and bright eyes.   
  
McCoy brushes his fingertips down Jim's torso and feels the flimsy shirt pull and ripple under his touch and beneath that muscle tightens and those eyes fall shut and McCoy feels like he won.   
  
But then again is there really a way to lose this? No. A man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed, but not defeated.   
  
And he's okay with that.   
  
He wants to know how it is that he has gone from drinking alone in a hotel room talking to hallucinations and ghosts to standing in a clap-to farm house in Georgia with Jim pliant and wanting in his arms.   
  
This is it.   
  
"'Should leave it on; It looks good on you."   
  
His voice is hoarse and the words make his lips ghost against Jim's but he doesn't kiss him, he just pulls him forward by hooking a finger into a belt loop and thinks that this seems inevitable, looking back. Hindsight being 20/20 and all.   
  
Electricity surges up through the floor and McCoy rests his hands on Jim's hips and runs them up Jim's sides and he counts his own measured, even breaths and takes notes on how Jim's breathing is erratic.   
  
McCoy's fingers move across shoulder blades and he can feel the letters' texture under his palm and then he hooks his hands over Jim's shoulders and moves his mouth to Jim's ear.   
  
He knows exactly what it is he wants to say but he can't seem to vocalize so instead he holds Jim a little tighter to his chest, fingertips digging in, and tries not to think about consequences.  
  
"You can take it off me later," Jim mumbles and his fingers find McCoy's hair and card through it.   
  
"That so?" McCoy's mouth feels dry at what appears to be an invitation.   
  
And then the tip of Jim's tongue is tracing over his lips, "do it."   
  
Jim retreats with a flush creeping up his neck and he turns to start relocating boxes into the other room. McCoy watches and licks over the still damp trails left on his mouth from Jim's tongue.   
  
He muses over the flavour: _Coffee and sex._  
  
****  
  
They're sitting on the floor in what was once a dining room, facing one another with an ever-changing treasure in between them.   
  
The floor is littered with the various artifacts that made up McCoy's young life. Ribbons from horse shows, a couple of trophies from baseball, science fair project awards...   
  
"God you were such a nerdy kid..." Jim is smiling and McCoy looks nervous. As if he's been stripped bare.   
  
He supposes in a way he has.   
  
"I was really into academics."   
  
"Translation: I had no life."   
  
McCoy scoffs, "I had plenty of a life, _thanks_."   
  
Jim leers, "really now?"   
  
"Not that I'll be tellin' you about it anytime soon."   
  
"You shouldn't be so secretive about things Bones. You know what they say about holding things in."   
  
"I'm a doctor, Jim. I -"  
  
"You _know_. I get it."   
  
McCoy rolls his eyes and turns away, his attention elsewhere as Jim finds a box filled with photos and holos and mementos. He takes a few out, casually letting the box slide in the way so that McCoy can't see him.   
  
And then Jim forgets to breathe.   
  
A holo flickers to life in front of him... McCoy looks shy almost, ducking his head from the camera with a half smile that knows more than it lets on. He's young, he looks a little more carefree and honest.   
  
In another McCoy seems to look right at Jim and smiles lazily, a bat slung over his shoulders and his hair tousled. His hip juts to one side and he kicks at the base, laughing quietly at some private joke that Jim is not privy to.   
  
There's one where McCoy rolls his eyes and turns away, caught just in time to catch the light sunburn over his nose making his eyes stand out; and one of him astride a black horse that throws it's head and McCoy laughs. He outright laughs and Jim is transfixed.   
  
The photos in his hands fall to the floor in a heap and he tries to take it all in and reconcile it with the bitter, crotchety man sitting in this room who is rifling through a box of old med-school notes.   
  
He doesn't understand it either, doesn't understand why it is that the more appealing of the two is the bitter doctor. With his baggage and his five o'clock shadow and his scowl and his Clark Gable kisses.   
  
"That was the last game of the year." McCoy is standing over him and Jim startles.   
  
"Which-- which one?"   
  
McCoy motions to the one of him with the bat and then he sinks down to the floor, mindful of his knee, "we'd just won."  
  
"You look like you hit the game-winning home-run."   
  
Jim smiles and McCoy shakes his head, "I was pinch hitting, grounded down the infield, went right between first and second and it was over..."   
  
"So you won the game."   
  
"You make it sound a lot more glamorous than it was, kid."   
  
Jim leans back on his hands and stretches his legs out in front of him, toeing a box until it's effectively out of reach, "why'd you stop playing?"   
  
"It was just a local league, nothing serious, just for fun... I got involved in other things."   
  
"Like science fairs."   
  
McCoy snorts, "no, like university."   
  
"You couldn't play there?"   
  
"You may not realize it, Jim, but pre-med is a very demanding major."   
  
"All you have to know is the human body."   
  
McCoy is rolling his eyes and Jim is smiling.  
  
"And all the things that can happen to it."   
  
"So basically all the things you'd later be treating James T. Kirk for?"   
  
"And then some."   
  
Jim laughs and slides down to his elbows, looking up at McCoy, "let's go out for drinks later."   
  
McCoy gets a crease in his brow, "this doesn't bode well."   
  
"You mean it bodes awesome, just a few, there's got to be a dive around here somewhere--"  
  
"Oh there is..." McCoy trails off and looks around at the boxes. He isn't sure why they brought them down in the first place except to reminisce. He figures it'll come to him later.   
  
"So let's go."   
  
Jim breaks into the mire that McCoy was dragging himself down into and McCoy reaches out to jab him in the ribs, "I'll go if you can keep your ass out of trouble."   
  
"You act like I go looking for it!"   
  
Jim fakes being wounded and McCoy plays into it.   
  
They clean up the past, pack it back into its boxes and it disappears into a corner to be carried up later.   
  
McCoy sets aside a couple of ratty looking leather-bound notebooks and doesn't see the things Jim slips away into his suitcase.   
  
****


	15. So are they all, all honourable men

The bar teems with life around him but McCoy is lost in thought, kicked back in his own booth twisting the ice cold beer in his hand. His bad leg is propped up into the opposite seat which is unoccupied as Jim is making nice with the locals over the pool table.   
  
He's still wearing McCoy's shirt. It is ostensibly poetic.   
  
McCoy stretches his mind in thought and gets lost in the meaning of no meaning at all. Of many things, but tonight he thinks of time. Of having all the time that exists in the world. Which is a folly of youth; believing that time in its present tense is everlasting. It isn't. It's completely finite.   
  
He stares into nowhere and thinks about what time has meant for him. What it means for everyone. Time as a noun, a verb, an adverb, an adjective... it's a versatile thing.   
  
He is waxing philisophical.   
  
Of course everyone has time, it's universal. But the unfortunate thing is that when you are born, the amount of time you have is already set. Your death is destined but you are unaware when that event, the event of death, may be.   
  
But you don't live for death. You live for life itself because of the inevitability _of_ death.   
  
He lets the bottle slip down to the tips of his fingers so that it hangs precariously above the table and he looks down at the whorls of the varnished wood. They twist and run into one another like galaxies. He daydreams of science, of space. And then time. He thinks about time as events, of all the different paths that have crossed and uncrossed since he met Jim and even the paths they walked alone before that.   
  
Being a doctor, McCoy deals in minutes and seconds as a separation of life and death. Life begins when he writes down the time of birth and the last thing they write in your medical file is time of death.   
  
Temporality is thus important to humans and he wonders if it's an emotional response. Time resonates with people so strongly because whether they acknowledge it or not, every day you are alive you are ticking precious minutes off an undefined clock.   
  
Like a bomb.   
  
Being human, the more he thinks about time, the more it hurts him. It hurts him more than he'd like to think about. Because time makes him think of Jim and how close he's been to losing him in the span of mere seconds.   
  
His profession, of course, dictates that he deals with Death but there is some part of him that cannot deal with Death and Jim.   
  
He has called Death an insidious bedfellow before, but the fact that Death has run it's icy hands over Jim and let him walk away makes McCoy's blood run cold.   
  
Death has seemingly dogged them from the very first moment they met. He should feel lucky then, that Jim still exists, he's had so many close calls. But instead he thinks of events outside of his control. He thinks of the "what if's" that exist in their lives.   
  
McCoy wonders if Jim thinks about these things - if he takes into consideration the millions of different outcomes they would have if things had not happened in exactly the way that they did.   
  
He tries to live not in regret but some days it's hard not to reflect on the philosophy of their existence. He summons Wittgenstein and the premise of the causal nexus, which is the idea that events are not linked together. That, _"the events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present. Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus."_ So it goes.  
  
Which he can't subscribe to. He wonders what philosophers would say of the future that was unknown to them. That if they could know the true events of time, of how time can bend and sway if they would still act so flippant about it's lack of connection. Wittgenstein later refuted the point of logical atomism so in some way he must have realized the wrong.   
  
So then, the truth of time lays in Santayana and the Law of Repetitive Consequence: _"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."_   
  
McCoy marvels at that, and thinks Jim must live by that statement alone considering his own past - The _USS Kelvin_ \- and the fact that history not only repeated itself but it folded _in_ on itself, doubled over, leaving them with a connection to a different time with different ends and consequences.   
  
So, time is malleable, undefined and liquid. It moves and we are simply along for the ride.   
  
In Jim's case, he abides by Santayana. But Spock, being thus his antithesis, focuses on the idea that in logic, nothing is accidental (logical atomism).   
  
Who's right?   
  
Maybe they both are, but McCoy feels justified in his human emotions since logic, cold and unfeeling, almost cost him his Captain.   
  
Spock who rejected the idea of past history and thus rejected the Kelvin almost compromised the Enterprise.   
  
He sets the empty bottle down onto the table and waves off the waitress who saunters by looking to refill him.   
  
McCoy bites on the inside of his cheek and thinks that if he hadn't snuck Jim on board, he himself would be dead. His split-second decision saved his own life, but looking back it's not as if he brought Jim on board with that in mind. He could not have known. He hardly ever considers himself grateful for being alive, he's just grateful that Jim is alive. That Jim is with him in the vast unknown regions of space because he could never conceive of space without him.   
  
He glances up and watches Jim's fingers rub chalk onto the end of a cue. McCoy swallows whatever other thoughts he might have had and philosophy fades into reality.   
  
McCoy decides then that philosophy is for the drunk. Sober it's almost intolerable and he's only two beers into the night and thus he falls into this realm.   
  
And they're all dead anyways, philosophers; left to footnote actions of the unwise.   
  
There's a crash and McCoy looks up to see Jim land a punch on some guy who stumbles backwards but immediately regains in time to launch his own right hook.   
  
"Oh fuck _me_."   
  
McCoy throws down enough credits to cover the tab and limps over, rolling up his shirt sleeves.  
  
He had a feeling this might happen.   
  
"Damnit Jim..." he mutters under his breath and when he's within reach he he grabs a hold of Jim's shirt and yanks him backwards cuffing him into a headlock of sorts and dragging him away from his attackers (or attackees, situation dependent).   
  
They exchange a number of words, most which implicate Jim as a trash talking cheat but only half of which McCoy believes. He manages to wrangle the two of them out before too much damage is done and when they're driving home McCoy fails to see a point in chastising for something he knew to be inevitable. At the same time, he feels it necessary to instill some kind of sense into Jim.  
  
"I'd appreciate it if you could just not get yourself injured when I'm not around a proper medical bay."   
  
"It's just a bloody nose-"   
  
"It's a _bloody nose_ \- you're rupturing shit up there and making it bleed out!"   
  
"Bones could you watch the road."   
  
"I _am_ watching the road but I'm trying to tell you something important, damnit!"   
  
"To not get into fights?"   
  
Jim's voice is muffled by the tissue he has shoved into his nasal cavity and he gives McCoy a sidelong look.   
  
"To not get into fights. Yes. Yes Jim Kirk. Do not get into fights."   
  
Jim starts to say something and McCoy cuts him off.  
  
"Aren't you supposed to be practicing diplomacy? You know, since you're the Captain?"   
  
"Why do I need diplomacy in Georgia?"   
  
McCoy makes a frustrated sound and turns onto the drive that leads up to the house and stops halfway there, throwing the car into park.   
  
They turn and look at each other over the console.   
  
Jim makes a snuffling sound and pulls out the tissues trying to give McCoy a hard look.   
  
"What are ya gonna do, make me get out and walk?"   
  
"I fuckin' ought to."   
  
"Is that a no?"   
  
McCoy exhales what should be a sigh and leans forward, kissing Jim a lot softer than he thought he could manage. He brushes his thumb over Jim's cheek and moves to kiss him deeper. Jim tastes like rum and blood which is disgusting but McCoy somehow manages to stomach it, probably because Jim is kissing back and not trying to turn it into a sparring match. It's careful, sincere.   
  
It's almost apologetic.   
  
They pull away and McCoy puts the car back into drive, idling it until they're right in front of the house.   
  
****  
  
They have a moment in the bathroom with Jim sitting on the counter, letting McCoy play doctor in a, quote:   
  
_"Completely innocuous fashion that isn't devolving into sex at all. This is disappointing, Bones. Seriously disappointing."_  
  
"Shut up and tilt your head back."   
  
"Want me to turn and cough?"  
  
" **Jim**."  
  
They fall into bed not too long after. Jim drifts into sleep almost immediately but McCoy lays awake for a long time.   
  
He watches the curtains ripple under the current from the overhead fan and thinks of Jim in a metaphor. He pulls him closer into his side and lets himself smile when Jim's arm unconsciously slips around his hips. They have a lot of time, or maybe they don't. But McCoy likes to think so, and so he pretends.   
  
"I love you, Jim."   
  
It is in that dark room that McCoy forgets the past. And the house, which has breathed with a life all it's own for so many years, exhales and is silenced.   
  
****


	16. I'll marry you when you're sleeping

When McCoy finally sleeps, he dreams. It's been awhile since it happened, but he welcomes the familiar tug in the back of his mind, triggering that part of the brain into action. The last time it happened he had conjured words that dissolved into stars and fell through space. It had deep meaning but he doesn't like to dwell.   
  
Tonight, unbidden, he dreams of his father.   
  
They're fishing off the dock at the lake. When he was young, they would ride down there in early morning, just the two of them. Sometimes they would talk, other times they would sit in each others' company and absorb the mood.   
  
There was something special about those days. Maybe because McCoy thought they wouldn't end, that he would grow up to his father growing old and that they would have time to share everything there was to know about life.   
  
He feels like he robbed himself of some precious treasure by aiding in his father's death.   
  
Of all the pain in McCoy's life, his father is the one pain he finds the hardest to forget. Sometimes he thinks he doesn't want to forget at all because that pain that exists is a reminder. It is a lesson.  
  
In his dream he tells his father he loves him and his father smiles.   
  
"You should tell him that."   
  
McCoy frowns, "tell who?"   
  
" _Him_."   
  
David motions behind his son and McCoy turns around and Jim is there, hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels with a smug smile tugging up the corners of his lips.   
  
"Bones."   
  
It's like he knows.   
  
Which is absurd. Seeing as how no man's knowledge can go beyond his experience.   
  
Which means he **really** _knows_.   
  
"Jim, I -"   
  
McCoy turns to look back and his father is gone. His chest hurts and when he turns back to Jim, he's closer than he was before and he's pulling McCoy up to his feet.   
  
McCoy starts to open his mouth to speak but everything starts to fade. The colors go out and for a brief moment it's a black and white film.   
  
Then the image is gone but the sound remains. He hears the water lapping against the dock pilings, he hears the birds and insects and he hears their voices.   
  
_"Bones?"  
  
"Jim?"   
  
"Bones, wake up."  
  
"Wait- wait no-"_  
  
And then the darkness opens up and the sound is muted for a brief moment.   
  
"Hey Bones."   
  
He wakes up.   
  
When he opens his eyes Jim is propped up over him and has a crooked smile.   
  
"You were dreaming."   
  
McCoy closes his eyes again and tries one last time to find the faded edges of that moment. But like fog over the water on a hot day, it's gone.   
  
He groans and drapes his arm over his eyes.   
  
"Go 'way, Jim. S'too early.. we're on vacation."  
  
"It's like nine, that's not early."   
  
"I'm supposed to be resting," McCoy growls in response and opens an eye enough to glare.   
  
"Resting your leg, not sleeping."   
  
Jim fights the covers off and kicks them to the foot of the bed and McCoy gives up.   
  
"I'm going for a run."   
  
McCoy gives Jim a look.   
  
"And when I get back, you should be up."   
  
"I know I already said this, but I'm coming to the conclusion that you just didn't hear." McCoy pushes himself up onto his elbows and levels what he hopes is a serious look at Jim, "it is _vacation_. I am _resting_. If I want to lay in bed until three in the damn afternoon - then I _will_."  
  
Jim smirks, "I can think of a lot of things to keep you in bed until three in the afternoon."   
  
"Go."   
  
"What?" Jim feigns innocence, a look that doesn't work well on him. Mostly because, as McCoy notes, he just can't carry it off at all.   
  
"Go run. Just get out I'll be 'up' when you return."   
  
Jim leers.   
  
"Up out of _bed_."   
  
"Killjoy."   
  
"Not the first time you've called me that kid."   
  
McCoy flops back to the bed.   
  
"Yeah and not the last, old man!" Jim calls from the vicinity of the hallway and McCoy absently flips him off before rolling off the bed to at least make an attempt at being productive.   
  
He manages a shower, even gets dressed in jeans and an old tee before he's right back where he started. McCoy obsessively makes up the bed, tucking in the corners and then props his knee onto a spare pillow and stretches out against the headboard.   
  
McCoy slides _The Catcher in the Rye_ off the nightstand and carefully turns pages until he finds where he left off.   
  
The house makes it's Old House Sounds, but it doesn't talk. It's stopped talking and humming and buzzing and whispering. Now it just has sounds that _exist_ \- of water in the pipes, electricity through the wiring, of the slight click of the overhead fan... it's very mechanical and very impersonal. But McCoy is grateful for this.  
  
Today then, McCoy doesn't think; he feels. He lets the warmth of the silent house lap against him and he concentrates on the feel of old style, quality, weighted paper against his fingers. He enjoys the sound it makes and how it's more human than his PADD. He exhales and the bed presses in around him as if in an embrace.   
  
McCoy is the Argument Waiting to Happen and he lives on a spaceship. But right now, he's vacationing at a farm house in the middle of nowhere because he and his Unlikely Captain of Starfleet's Flagship are insane.   
  
They're insane for each other.  
  
He couldn't argue that point. Rather, he _can't_. McCoy sets it in the present tense to make it more real; things told in the passive voice are for historians with no sense of storytelling and an inability to grasp fully the subject matter at hand.   
  
The room breathes out a sigh, the sound of the air conditioner shutting itself off. And McCoy, in his civilian clothes, hair damp from the shower, with no shoes or socks and a paper back book in his hands, is not himself.   
  
Or maybe there's the key, he really _is_ himself. Today he woke up and for once he didn't stumble blindly to an excuse or pretend or make amends. He just existed. He woke up and it was as if they've always woken up together. To be fair, they've woken up together before... but usually with all their clothes on. Usually with some sense that whatever happened they weren't supposed to remember. But not today.   
  
_Today_ McCoy is careful and with just _enough_ biting sarcasm. He is pleasant, almost _polite_ \- without the facade of "bitter." He's no longer callous and calculation, he is delightful and delighted and maybe even easily pleased and perhaps even next door to amused. He is smiling.   
  
He blames Jim.   
  
They say that it is a straight line that joins two points the fastest, but whoever said that getting somewhere quick was the way to go was obviously a mathematician and that is something McCoy is not. Thankfully Jim isn't one either and instead, together, they are hopelessly sincere and in a way poetic.   
  
Which is exactly why they go the long way. The road less traveled, and in the modus operandi they have become authors of a story that is written in lingering touches, soft presses of lips and looks that held too long.   
  
So then this is _it_.   
  
_This_ is them and they are...   
  
McCoy almost doesn't want to say it. Because he has told Jim he loves him a thousand times, but only when he isn't there. Only when he's far away dreaming. McCoy isn't sure how to phrase those words now that he knows what Jim tastes like, what Jim's skin feels like under his rough fingers, what sounds Jim makes in the back of his throat when he wants something.   
  
Closing his eyes against the impending afternoon heat, J.D. Salinger lays forgotten on the bed and McCoy has found his own way home.   
  
****  
  
Almost as soon as he's fallen asleep, McCoy wakes up to Jim, still damp from the shower, crawling into bed next to him in nothing but a towel. He cracks an eye open and listens to Jim complain of humidity and insects. Staples of a southern life.   
  
"I don't know how you do it, old man..."   
  
"Hm?"   
  
Jim raises an eyebrow, "oh you're awake."   
  
"It would appear so."   
  
McCoy rolls onto his side to look at Jim, and in the haze of half asleep and barely awake he remembers the tail ends of earlier thoughts. They flicker into existence like fireflies over the creek and glow bright and burning leaving trails in their wake.   
  
He smiles, and it's real.   
  
Jim's breath hitches in his chest and he exhales one word: "Bones..."  
  
Before he can even finish the thought, McCoy slides in close, cupping Jim's cheek and kissing him.   
  
It's slow. Unbearably slow. It's Easy Sunday Morning After Coffee kind of slow; Where colors seem brighter and deeper and more intense.   
  
_Oh_ this is happening. McCoy can feel it, he can feel that uncoiling nervous energy that's plagued him for weeks and it's all flooding out. He is all senses, all taste, sight, touch, smell, and sound. That last one is important because this house has a symphony all it's own. The timid white noise that has whittled away the morning with him has been muted out in deference to the greatest feat of human achievement:   
  
Jim's _pulse_.   
  
Thank _God_ for George and Winona Kirk; for blessing the world with this incandescent perfection that is in bed with Leonard Flawed McCoy and who is making the most incredible sounds.   
  
It's like surgery, McCoy thinks. It's like twentieth century surgery. With cutting and fixing and stitching. He just takes Jim apart from the top down, opens him up and mends what's broken. He soothes, he repairs and then he puts him back together again.   
  
This deconstructive therapy is something they both need. McCoy needs it to reaffirm to himself that he's still capable of doing this and Jim needs it to affirm once and for all that he's more than just a casual, passing sort of person. He needs to know he's worth more than that. And no words McCoy has are enough.   
  
So McCoy uses actions. He uses his lips, his fingertips and tongue. He spoons against Jim and holds him into his chest and explores with that elegant physician's touch that's almost light enough to be a tickle and yet not quite. It's too firm, too _demanding_ for that. It has Jim stretching on the bed and panting out _more_ and _yes_ and _God, please_ and for things that McCoy isn't sure he can give.   
  
McCoy presses against him and uses his hand, fingers wrapping and moving in a purposely slow rhythm. He has his mouth on Jim's shoulder and he bites down, just enough to leave a quick fading mark on Jim's fever-hot skin. It's something Jim must like because he's grabbing at the sheets and cursing; fisting high count cotton thread in his hands and he's just barely shaking with restraint.   
  
"Are you close?" McCoy whispers and the hoarse reply is enough to almost make him lose it himself.   
  
"God.. _YES_ \-- Bones--” and Jim's reaching back and wrapping fingers into McCoy's hair, grabbing and pulling.   
  
"Shh..."   
  
"Nnn no.. not yet, wait--"   
  
There's barely room for air between them and McCoy is as tight against Jim as he can be and every shudder, every breath, every beat of his heart is thunderously loud. McCoy breathes against Jim's ear, ragged, hot and he nips at the tan skin.   
  
"Give in."   
  
Because it's not like Jim to give _up_.  
  
****  
  
McCoy lays out on his side with Jim stretched on his back beside him. They've cleaned up and McCoy lost his his clothes somewhere in the bargain. He thinks he won.   
  
He uses his fingertips to write the words he isn't saying into Jim's skin, up and down his torso, watching as Jim comes all the way down. McCoy sits up enough, leaning over Jim and kissing his mouth open even though he's already half asleep. He wants to taste him and claim him. He wants to tell him he loves him but he can't stop long enough in this tactile appreciation to make words happen.   
  
Jim is running his hands along McCoy's sides and forcing their bodies together until they fit almost into each other.  
  
“Mmtired” Jim mumbles, his eyes already closed but his mouth still actively participating against McCoy's.   
  
“I thought naps were for old people?”   
  
“Maybe I'm getting old then.”   
  
McCoy snorts and slides off of Jim, laying down in the now rumpled sheets and dragging him in possessively. He starts to drift out and just before he goes over the edge into sleep, he thinks he could get used to this and tries not to think too hard about what going back on board the Enterprise will mean for them.   
  
He figures he has right now and he's grateful for that.   
  
****


	17. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution

It's edging closer towards evening than it is afternoon, but even late in the day the sun seems to scorch the earth. They'd been cooped up the day before due to rain and though the day had been arguably (McCoy's word) well spent, there was still the desire to escape the confines of the house.   
  
Today it's too hot to talk and so they've been existing in silence for the duration. Occasionally Jim communicates some kind of distaste but it goes unnoticed.   
  
Much to his chagrin, McCoy is impervious to his complaints and apparently to the temperature as well.   
  
(This is something which Jim finds annoying since someone as argumentative as McCoy should find fault with anything outside of 'regulation' but here he is, _basking_ in the inferno. Worse, he's enjoying it.)  
  
McCoy lays back and let's the swell of summer heat overtake him. The insistent low buzz of insects outside in the brush makes him lazy and the too-warm breeze is just enough to cool the sweat on his brow. The humidity hangs low and with the combined thrum from the cicadas it's as if the very air vibrates with life.   
  
The hay makes a dry, raspy sound every time he shifts and where his skin is exposed it tickles him into an itch.   
  
He closes his eyes and breathes in deep. He wants to remember this when he's back on the Enterprise. The farm, the heat, the humidity, the _'fucking bugs'_ , the way the barn smells and Jim.   
  
God he wants to remember Jim.   
  
McCoy swears he's going to take that shirt back and when he's having a bad day he'll just get Jim to put the damn thing on and lay around doing inane shit in it. Maybe get him to pour drinks or read briefings or just... whatever.   
  
Anything.   
  
He wants to remember the way he gets this defensive pout going when he's been dragged out of a bar in the middle of a losing fight. And he really wants to remember the way Jim feels naked under his hands and mouth, the way he tastes and the things he says when they're alone and the lights are out.   
  
McCoy licks his lips and blinks slowly, feeling the sudden drop in temperature. He rubs his jaw with the back of his hand and glances out in time to see the thunderhead crackling on the edge of his vision.  
  
The wind picks up here and there, sending the trees into a fit of passion. They tremble against the currents, bending and swaying as they cast shadows over the open windows of the loft. Downstairs a stall door swings open and it creaks on the hinges, showing it's age.  
  
When McCoy breathes out, he can hear the answering intake of breath that means Jim is close by.   
  
He isn't sure when Jim moved this close, but he accepts the gift all the same. The floor groans as Jim edges closer and McCoy cracks an eye open in time to watch Jim slide gracefully to his knees and crawl forward.   
  
Despite his eyes feeling heavy with sleep unhad, McCoy opens them all the way to watch, sliding up onto his elbows and giving Jim a lazy sort of half smile.   
  
He's learning lately that of all the things he does or says, that is the one that takes Jim most by surprise. So he saves it and uses it at intervals, delighting in the response every time.   
  
"I think you have something against me sleeping," McCoy mumbles and watches Jim's lips quirk up into a half-smile.   
  
McCoy tries to ignore the way Jim is moving up the length of his body but it's hard when Jim purposely grazes and brushes against him whenever he can.  
  
"You just looked so into it."   
  
"I was into, you'll notice I haven't gotten much of it even though this is my alleged vacation."   
  
"I think you'll enjoy this a lot more than sleep though," Jim's voice is low as he straddles McCoy's hips and leans in to breathe sins out right against his ear.   
  
"Yes."   
  
McCoy answers aloud in that single word and slides all the way back down, using his hands for more exquisite adventures. They traverse the length of Jim's thighs and when McCoy's fingers are brushing against the edges of Jim's leather belt the entire afternoon degrades from here.   
  
The shutters on the windows begin to knock into the sides of the barn and Jim's leaning full over McCoy, fingers running hot down his forearms and gripping at his elbows and his mouth is next to McCoy's ear. Jim narrates and McCoy feels his mind go blessedly slack.   
  
There are _suggestions_ , maybe insinuations, maybe promises... McCoy isn't sure, he just goes with it, he inserts whatever coherent words he can string together which converge into a single verb:  
  
Acquiesce.   
  
He's _there_. That is _him_ ; he is a synonym, which is:   
  
Compliant.   
  
McCoy is thirty-one years of age and despite every one of those years he's spent mastering self control and personal growth he is getting hard off dirty talk and clothes-on touching.   
  
McCoy firmly believes there is something wrong with that but he can't put together what that wrong might be. Instead he kisses Jim's throat, up along his jaw to his chin and then his mouth.   
  
He fixates: Jim's mouth. The perfection of soft and rough and slick. _Oh_. Slick, wet, _hot_. McCoy thinks about how he could drown in the sensation, how he _wants_ to. How he is completely _okay_ with the whole situation, with the touches and the deep cerebral discussion and the long nights and the mindless, trivial togetherness.   
  
" _You_ \--"   
  
Accusational.   
  
Jim kisses him slow, drawing it out, answering without talking and pulling back when he's ready with a cocky, self-assured, hoarse, "me?"   
  
And it's like honey.   
  
McCoy drags a thumb across Jim's bottom lip and they don't move.   
  
"Jim, I-"   
  
"-know. I do too."   
  
McCoy is flung back into the reasonably close past. A place where he can't say 'it's been too long and I forgot' because this he remembers. He remembers this with a kind of obsessive clarity.   
  
_Jim's hand on the door and McCoy touched the small of his back.  
  
They shared a look and this:   
  
"Jim."   
  
Silence, if only what crossed in looks could convey itself in words not too-tired to manifest...   
  
"I-" he started.   
  
"-know." Jim finished.  
  
McCoy shut his mouth and looked away.   
  
Jim's voice was soft, almost silent, "I do too."_  
  
He is a blind man and a fool. A doctor and a father. A prophet and a saint. He is consistent, abrasive, professional, too-tired, faulty, bitter, classic, earnest, adoring, old and in love.   
  
McCoy lifts his eyes enough to meet Jim's and today it is not too much and the adjectives that comprise him surge forward and emotion that he has an overabundance of is enough. It sustains, it is sufficient. He hesitates on the threshold and can't say anything but his hand is pushing back into Jim's hair and Jim is pushing him down into the hay and slipping in between his thighs.   
  
McCoy thinks maybe they've been too much about action lately, but hypocritically he has nothing to say and thus is reduced to pantomime in order to construct his point. For in a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.  
  
But he isn't poetry, he isn't stanzas and cooperative pairings and meter or syllabic. He is careful verse, he is song.   
  
He works in 4/4 time.  
  
The sun passes behind clouds and the room shadows in response, but it seems just as bright to McCoy, with Jim's mouth on his, working it open and tasting him as deep as he can.   
  
McCoy runs his hands under Jim's shirt and over his ribs (counting, as if he doesn't know every single one of them by heart) and he wants this. He wants everything that Jim's offering or insinuating so he slides his hands back down, into the back pockets of Jim's jeans, and he spreads his fingers out and forces Jim forward.   
  
Jim's mouth pulls off of his with a gasp, "Jesus-" as if invoking the Son of God is going to put what they have into perspective, and then he's groaning and rolling his hips of his own accord.   
  
They shift against each other and McCoy forces himself up enough to roll Jim to the side, so they can face each other. The hay prickles into their shirts and everywhere else but it's just another sensation among a thousand others.  
  
The down-burst from the storm is enough to send shocks of chills down McCoy's bare arms and he loses the sounds that Jim makes as the wind picks up and the sun disappears out of view. McCoy grapples harder for some kind of control - he kisses Jim deep as the first drops of rain bear down and he hopes this is enough. That this gets his point across. All he's wanted to say since he was limping Jim out of that stupid bar is that he loves him and could he _please_ not get himself killed because he _needs_ him.   
  
The insects have quieted in the wake of the late-afternoon storm, but the rain on the tin roof is deafening.   
  
McCoy bends his leg up to change the position and instead Jim takes advantage of it, gripping McCoy's thigh, fingers digging in and nipping at his bottom lip as he rocks forward, spreading McCoy's legs around his own thigh and making a low sound into his mouth.   
  
"Bones-"   
  
"-just-"  
  
" _Bones_ -"  
  
"Fuck, I-"   
  
He opens his eyes and Jim is right there, all bright and blue with a flush over his face and down his neck and he pulls back; he pulls away and McCoy follows him, frowning and grabbing for whatever he can reach. He catches his fingers against the hem of Jim's shirt and they both stop, staring at each other, as if for the first time realizing.   
  
Lightning rips through the sky and they don't even flinch.  
  
"What...?"  
  
The question in McCoy's voice isn't accusing or angry, it's confused and he pulls at Jim, harder this time. Because he's made up his mind and he's shut out the demons or whatever was left hanging on that held him back and if it was a mistake, if it was just _him_ , he thinks he might die.   
  
"Let's go in," Jim's voice is strange and uneven.   
  
McCoy's breaths come in a stuttering pattern, as if to match.   
  
"It's pouring out there-"   
  
"I know but... let's go in."   
  
McCoy looks Jim in the eyes and tries to find answers.  
  
"Jim, it-"  
  
"Bones," it's solid and McCoy feels almost hit by the word. The power in hearing his name in Jim's voice, in the tone that he's using, "I want to--" he pauses, as if searching for second takes and swallows, looking slightly to McCoy's left, avoiding in embarrassment, "it's got to mean something."   
  
"What?" McCoy's fingers loosen and Jim grabs his wrist, and the heat of the day before the rain was nothing compared to the look in those eyes as they turn fully onto McCoy.  
  
"I want to remember this."   
  
"This?"   
  
"With you."   
  
McCoy understands now. He nods and does not argue, kisses Jim with intensity and purpose.   
  
He has shrugged off what it means to be the Fool and instead he is the Stars.   
  
****


	18. When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain

The back door snaps shut behind them and McCoy is barely out of his shoes when Jim crowds against him, pulling and pushing at once. They trip over one another and almost fall. McCoy makes a face, faking agony over his knee which only makes vague complaints and he chuckles at the haste. Jim kisses him with a smile and they pause somewhere between points A and B.

The couch is backed into, circumnavigated and the hallway closes in around them within four steps.

McCoy pulls at Jim's shirt, dragging them together through the door to the bedroom. Despite a noticed lack of other guests, McCoy still pushes the door shut behind them. He could blame it on habit but when he thinks about it later, he wants to shut this memory into this room and not give it the chance to escape through the house and dissipate.

If it stays within these four walls it remains saturated. Maybe even tangible.

"I want you."

Three words break the spell and the uncertainty is replaced with the intensity and determination from the hay loft. All force and then, like paper curling in white hot flame, it is all _finesse._ The bed nudges against the back of McCoy's knees and he sinks down to the covers.

He looks up and a smile pulls at the corner of Jim's mouth. There is a struggle to remove shirts. McCoy's is peeled free first with assistance from Jim who is hasty and unwanting of games and who sheds his top himself.

There is a desert of skin and McCoy slips his hands along the backs of Jim's thighs and presses kisses against his stomach, looking up through wet bangs to find Jim staring right back. There are whispers of intimacy that insinuate themselves in the back of McCoy's mind and he only half-heartedly listens at first, but when Jim mumbles his name, the whispers turn up.

Fingers thread through McCoy's hair and a tingle starts at the base of his spine and runs up until it makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He turns, kissing along the inside of a wrist and listens as Jim sucks in a breath before he descends.

Jim pushes McCoy back and crawls onto the bed next to him and time plays with speed. Slowing and accelerating at random. In his mind, McCoy thinks of ancient tapes - those figures in books with film and winding mechanisms and the coiling and uncoiling and fast forward and rewind and-

Pause.

McCoy appreciates with touch and presses his thumb where Jim's hip juts out; he traces the line of the bone to where it disappears into his jeans and thinks it's a pretty _neat_ reaction how Jim is no-nonsense and slides over top of him, straddling his hips, his knees pressing in on both sides.

"Oh."

It should be an insinuating question, cheeky maybe, but when McCoy says it, the tone is that of a statement. Jim doesn't move and stays on his knees without sitting all the way down.

"Oh?" leave it to Jim to expertly pull off the appropriate intonation.

And yet:

" _Oh_ ," McCoy reiterates and feels bone and muscle and skin shift under his fingers and he explores a body that he knows too well under different circumstances. It should be foreplay, and instead Jim doesn't particpate so much as he just lets McCoy touch him. Skilled, long, fingers moving over his stomach, his ribs, along his side and down his back. He recognizes the points of interest along the way, all of them scars for wounds McCoy has treated.

They aren't there anymore - the physical reminders - but McCoy remembers. Jim's face is tucked against the crook of his neck and shoulder and his breathing has gone from slow and even to erratic and ragged. McCoy's hands move to his hips and pull him down until they meet and then he takes the lead.

He pushes at the waistband of Jim's pants but he doesn't slip them off. He's _teasing_. It's a newly rediscovered action for him, something young, irresponsible and only a little reckless.

It's good for him, though.

Jim's forehead is against his and he's talking in between pants. Things that may be profound, or cautiously without inhibitions, McCoy makes no judgements.

Instead he takes issue with wet denim as it's nearly impossible to remove. But like so many arguments, excuses and unfinished moments that have come before, they too fall away under the right conditions. Jim is careful as he slides McCoy's jeans and boxers down over his legs and smiles when McCoy sits up to cover himself.

"You embarrassed?"

"Immensely," McCoy rolls his eyes and hears how hoarse his own voice is and how it underscores the sarcasm of his answer as Jim maneuvers them both down to the mattress with his usual grace.

"Don't be," Jim mumbles against McCoy's mouth.

The house is over-warm and they forgot to turn on the fan, but it's less of a problem or impediment and more of a catalyst. The temperature spikes and urgency comes back full circle as their bodies collide and create friction but never enough to start something. The kisses that stray from lips and down necks are returned in kind; touches that fluctuate between soft and hard are reciprocated and doubled.

McCoy turns so that when he speaks, his words go directly into Jim's ear. The only thing that he can manage is, "hurry."

He vocalizes his demand low and rough, grabbing tighter at Jim, expecting him to try and leave again, to maybe change the terms as he did when they were outside.

But his fears are never realized. As if Jim would even consider the thought with his hands splayed on the bed, and his mouth on McCoy's and their bodies aligning like undrawn constellations.

This moment matters so completely. McCoy can feel it crackle in the air like ions bursting in a lightning storm. Electricity running through their bodies; raw ends, unattached nerves and frayed wires. But the circuit becomes complete when Jim is inside of him.

His knee aches as he bends it at an awkward angle, hooking behind Jim's thigh and pulling him closer.

_Please... Jim... God... More..._

They're familiar but foreign at the same time. They perhaps don't come in that order, are maybe less coherent, yet undoubtedly repeated.

Jim is careful though, moving slow and McCoy thinks he's being driven slowly mad. That this purposeful lingering is a mission to undo every fraction of control he has left.

For a moment that he wants to remember with perfect clarity, there is little that he holds onto. It's not that what happens isn't memorable, far from it, but rather that when McCoy finds himself in what should be the memory, participating, all he wants to remember is Jim since he is what matters.

McCoy forgets that he's even part of it at all, he focuses on the way Jim closes his eyes when he's concentrating, the little wrinkle lines on his forehead, how he bites on his bottom lip and how they _fit_.

McCoy remembers his hand on Jim's back, how he's a mixture of rain-soaked cold and exertion-heated hot. He remembers how Jim tastes (of salt, cotton and summer sun) and how his sweat-slicked skin feels under his fingertips. And McCoy remembers Jim holding him down as he comes, Jim kissing into his neck and breathing against his ear that this is what he's always wanted.

There is time after when they lay on top of the covers and the fan has been turned on that McCoy begins to slip in and out of wakefulness. Jim wraps against his side, an arm over his chest, curled there just like he belongs.

And he does.

His face is turned up just enough for McCoy to watch him sleep. He runs a hand along Jim's shoulders, kissing the top of his head. McCoy admires the long lines, the contours and planes of Jim's body - that of an athlete. He contemplates Greek mythology and his thumb brushes the curve of Jim's jaw.

Adonis? No, McCoy thinks with a frown, not insipid youthful beauty, Jim is more than that.

Achilles then.

A chill circulates the room and McCoy realizes in that moment _he_ would be dumb enough to throw on Jim's armor and go headlong into a battle he cannot win.

He is Patroclus.

Which means that he is what pushes Jim into action. He forces the war.

_"In the lift --" he shifts uncomfortably and McCoy turns his head enough to watch him, fixing him under his stare, "it isn't who I lost, well it is, but it's about who I could have lost."_

Jim meets McCoy's look and what McCoy wants to say is there between them. McCoy wants to tell him about the true value of the words 'what if' because those two words have redefined their lives in a profound way that neither can fully grasp.

Raison d'être.

****

 


	19. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time, we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.

Listen.   
  
Every beginning has an end, so too with this; it begins with "Listen" and ends with "he loved me too."   
  
The rain that blew in late in the afternoon settles around the house and stays through dinner, into the night and onto breakfast. Jim takes the opportunity to contemplate the finer points of human anatomy instead of sulking over cabin fever but he feels the end is approaching.   
  
They have lived out the days of vacation in a kind of softcell happiness. At first the idea of a week dragged before them like an uncharted band of stars: Foreign, wickedly defiant and yet filled with promise.   
  
But the end of their time is like a supernova; there's energy and the all consuming void of expectation.   
  
There is no death, only metaphorical and perhaps rebirth.  
  
McCoy stretches on the worn-in sofa and watches Jim's idea of packing come to fruition: a lumpy bag, a few souvenirs and a light headache.   
  
He relaxes under the scrutiny of a lamp. In his lap are the leather bound books from their initial foray into the attic. He traces the embossed letters on the cover with the tips of his fingers and reads the letters a few times to be sure.   
  
_David McCoy_  
  
The cover makes a practiced sound, a creak with age, an absent cracking of disuse. The pages shuffle under his thumb as he watches lines of his father's handwriting tumble past, catching words on every other page.   
  
_...Spring colts.... afternoon sunshower... Leonard... Fall is here... lightning... the practice... Leonard... windows... old rusted up truck... apple season... favorite flowers... Leonard..._   
  
And abrubtly the words stop.   
  
McCoy has to flip backwards to find the last of the entries. They stop halfway down a page, thought completed.   
  
_We're still harvesting things out of the garden regardless of that damn replicator. I don't care what anyone else says the tomatoes out of it taste funny._  
  
McCoy smiles, almost chuckles as the pads of his fingers skim the last sentences. He turns absently over a few more pages but that seems to be the end. Not really thinking about it, he goes to the very last page.   
  
There, at the bottom are two words.   
  
So simple, in the same halting physician's penmanship that belongs to his father. It reminds him of his own; they make the same loop in the letter 'y'.  
  
It takes him a minute to come up with the meaning. He's fuzzy on the translation, but it comes to him in the end.   
  
_Memento Mori_.   
  
Remember, you will die.  
  
It's as if the air is pulled out of his lungs and he's feeling for the first time.   
  
McCoy looks up and the lights seem to shiver around him. They preach their electric scripture around the room from the pulpit of a socket and though they are finite and alive, he is beginning to think he can't relate. He's temporal and starting to die.   
  
Or maybe that's the point, that they've been dying all along. That they were only ever alive in bits and pieces. Still frames and polaroids; vintage throwbacks of life inside of a _Time Magazine_ clipping.   
  
Jim made him alive.   
  
He looks across the coffee table to where Jim has been mollified by an antique radio for the better part of an hour.   
  
They share a look just before McCoy's knee drops off the table and the throw pillow it was resting on skitters under a chair for cover.   
  
The tiny mechanisms that comprised the radio so recently fall to the floor with a metallic rattle as Jim finds himself half on McCoy and half on the lumpy sofa.   
  
As soon as he's there he's leaning in but McCoy stops him; reaches up with both hands and cups his jaw, holding him. The sound of a single screw rolling back and forth on the hardwood floor searching for purchase is the only sound.   
  
"What?"   
  
McCoy exhales and feels the brush of Jim's lips on his.   
  
"What is it?"   
  
"We're running out of time..."   
  
Jim smiles and McCoy knows they exist on different loops of sub-atomic string. Jim hums with positivity, supplying the correct oscillatory pattern and vibratory resonance to become an up-quark. He exists.   
  
"Damnit, Jim, I-"   
  
"Yeah?"   
  
It's so cocky and self-assured that McCoy just wants to shut him up, because proving him right means dealing with _smug_ ; and he can't do that right now, it feels too tight in here.  
  
"God I could kill you sometimes," McCoy mutters, being contradictory on priciple.   
  
He is coherent yet incohesive. Because being well put together is not all it's cracked up to be.   
  
Hypocritical.   
  
_Ironic_.   
  
He demonstrates self control and restraint even as he feels the threads that make up 'Leonard H. McCoy' fray and unwind.   
  
McCoy asks himself if this is what he ever imagined. No, is the resounding answer. He gets the same answer when he asks himself if he would change it or have it any other way.   
  
Deliberate. Obtuse. Metaphorical. Literal at the end since face value changes dependent on the market. The rest matter a lot more.   
  
There is infinite possibility as if he can change the world with just a look. But why change anything when this is what situation has brought him.   
  
Circumstance being what it is; the world is everything that is the case.  
  
He differentiates with an educated highbrow stance.   
  
Decides that the indefinite is appealing. Puts away immorality and accepts what religion really means in the scientific aspect.   
  
Which is: that which cannot be explained can still be believed.   
  
Thank God.   
  
He can't explain what he is to Jim, what Jim is to him or what _they_ are. (Being: remember, in all languages it is the first verb you conjugate: as "to be" is the most important.)   
  
As Shakespeare intoned there are only two modii to life: to be, or not to be.   
  
_Hamlet_ , a tragedy.   
  
And McCoy? He's a comedy.   
  
Maybe _Much Ado About Nothing_ or _A Midsummer Night's Dream._  
  
But he is.   
  
He always assumed that he was the subejct - Jim the verb. That, like the neutrino, he existed but never was. But that's a misnomer. He is just as much as Jim is, he just exists differently. And though they exist as two verbs they compliment one another. They are bleeding together like watercolor on textured paper. Drowning in margins, pooling in grooves but they exist.   
  
"I'm still alive right?"   
  
Yes, yes Jim. You do exist. As certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.   
  
"Thank God... you'll live and live forever."   
  
Jim smiles and McCoy can't fault him this time, just kisses him a little more and tries to make it less heavy inside.   
  
"Let's go outside."   
  
***  
  
So they relocate with a bottle of wine and sit in amicable silence for a spell watching the landscape roll away from the house.   
  
"It reminds me of Iowa."   
  
"Good Iowa or Bad Iowa?" McCoy asks, idly swirling the wine left in his tumbler.   
  
Jim laughs, "Good Iowa. Summer when I was eight and my brother and I and probably eight other boys all camped out in the middle of a field. I couldn't sleep and kept tossing and turning and when the fire went out and the other boys were asleep, Sam pulled his sleeping bag over to mine and used an old pocket telescope to show me the Orion nebula."   
  
McCoy looks at him out of the corner of his eyes, "you'd never seen it before?"   
  
"It was different that time, he talked about our dad, about life and about death."   
  
"Heavy stuff for an eight year old."   
  
"Everything's heavy when you're eight."   
  
They laugh, a cautious sound as if testing whether or not it's supposed to be humor. They meet in the middle and Jim reaches out to top off his cup and then McCoy's too.   
  
"He told me that we never really die. That we're just leaving one end to pursue another. That we're still alive somewhere, living out another adventure until that ends." Jim looks down and sips at his drink before leaning back into the swing and pushing them so that they sway in a gentle, subtle way, "it made me feel better. It made me think that my dad was just in another star system, just somewhere out of reach, some uncharted place that we hadn't yet discovered. Sam told me that if hundreds of suns could be born in that one nebula that we'd never chart the whole universe, we might never find dad again but that didn't mean he wasn't out there."   
  
"Do you believe it?"   
  
"In my dad still being alive somewhere?"   
  
McCoy stares straight ahead but can still see Jim watching him from the corner of his eyes.   
  
"Any of it."   
  
"I believe in all of it; I might never find that star system where he's living some other iteration of life, but I still believe. I couldn't even ride in a starship if I didn't, Bones. Time is a relative thing; it bends and flexes. It has a different meaning to fit the person viewing it so I can't say that one person's time has ended if I can't see their version of it."  
  
"Physics."   
  
The breeze catches in the hollows and eaves singing the subdued tones of the last page to the Great American Novel.   
  
"Promise you won't forget me, Bones?"   
  
"Am I going somewhere?"   
  
Jim laughs and slides until he can drape artfully against McCoy's side, "we all go in the end, even if the end never comes."   
  
McCoy snorts and almost misses it when Jim says: "'If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.'"   
  
He startles and Jim nudges him playfully, "you aren't the only one who's read the Bible, old man."   
  
It's as close to _I love you_ as McCoy has ever gotten and he stupidly forgets to say it back.  
  
When he remembers ten minutes later, it's too late to reply and so he writes four letters into the slip of skin that shows where the hem of Jim's shirt has ridden up. Like the scarlet letter that Hester Prynne wore, it announces his sins and though it doesn't show, he feels it burn under his palm like a reminder.  
  
***  
  
There are realizations, promises and maybe some indecision. But in the end there is resignation. The thought of choosing battles and accepting loss and counting small victories. McCoy can't sleep and instead his mind works overtime as his body remains static.   
  
He thinks about the nuances and similarities of language, how powerful the slight shift in enunciation can be. There are accents and tones, conjugations, declensions, and throughout the Universe, standardizations are broken down by simple colloquialisms, turns of phrase and local idiosyncracies. Regional dialects and urban versus rural _sound_.   
  
Which is why McCoy enjoys the human body. There is no language to it, no formality or ugly demands of structure. The body, to him, is a symphony. Blood rushing through the veins, neurons firing, muscles and tendons flexing and _re_ flexing, bones strung together by fibers that stretch and cartilidge which gives only just enough. He thinks of the smallest bones: the feet and the inner ear.   
  
It's such an enormous thing to walk and to listen.   
  
He hears the soft chorus of Jim's breaths next to him and despite the sound of insects in the night, of an owl in the distance calling to the unknown, of the light rattle that the air conditioner makes... he catches the beat of Jim's heart.   
  
Blood in, blood out.   
  
Circulation, aeration.   
  
He calls up the image of Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man; the proportionary perfection that comprises the piece of art; how art mimics life. In McCoy's opinion it was never the symmetrical value that made the piece worthwhile, it was instead how the picture wrote without words a commentary on the body as a whole. Superficial inequities do not diminish the inherent beauty of man.   
  
McCoy brushes his thumb over Jim's bottom lip and watches as Jim's life functions complete the Golden Ratio.  
  
"You think too much."   
  
Jim's voice breaks the concert and in McCoy's mind it makes a light twinkling noise as it breaks apart; like wind chimes in a summer storm.   
  
He is quick to recover: "It's what doctors do."   
  
"S'that so?"  
  
McCoy grunts and slides down next to Jim. They share a pillow and as Jim's eyes fall closed against his will, McCoy wonders if they'll share dreams.   
  
****  
  
McCoy is the last one out of the house.   
  
Jim stands by the car answering a call and McCoy tries to remember everything.   
  
What he walks away with is the way that the cielings in the living room are higher and brighter than everywhere else in the house - and how the big windows and the glass doors on the one wall make everything look very surreal and comfortable. The colors are muted but in his mind and in his memories they will always be vivid.   
  
And despite Wittgenstein, the Unified Field Theory, science and God, he wants to believe that when he dies this is what he'll wake up to.  
  
Jim calls across the lawn and McCoy answers inside his mind, _'I'll follow you and make a heaven out of hell, and I'll die by your hand which I love so well.'_  
  
After all, when everything is said and done, Shakespeare is just as reliable as the others; it's all literature in the end.  
  
***  
  
Seven weeks in space and McCoy still daydreams about the foothills of the Appalachian mountains.   
  
As McCoy leaves sickbay, he lineates between fiction and real life; of himself as the unwilling protagonist, flawed, no doubt defensive and indecisive... always living in the shadow of someone greater, more bright and charming and illuminating.   
  
It has never occured to him that _he_ is the bright and charming and illuminating person to Jim. Though if he is Patroclus then it is only fair to assume the other truth in literary and mythological storytelling.   
  
His life is a novel. There are leading roles, a supporting cast, a beginning, some rising action, a climax and a denoument. Ever since he's met Jim he's been in a series of events that have led him to this moment.   
  
By chance, or elegant intelligent design, they have ended up in the elevator together. Jim talks about the bridge because he resonates to the tune of charm-quarks; bouys up the moment until McCoy has been sold on mundane being the climactic turning point.   
  
"I love you."   
  
Jim turns and their fingers fall apart from where they were absently bridging some mediocre divide.   
  
"Bones..."   
  
And though he doesn't say it back, McCoy knows it's there. They've been saying it all along.   
  
He had thought that the lead character does not accept the spotlight but lives in the shadow of the supporting cast, narrating their effervescence; they are beautiful rose-gold figures blown full of life by writers and directors, and after hours they sit around and talk in whispers and giggled innuendoes, and the ends of many adventures flow through them.  
  
The radio, the open door.   
  
And McCoy is this: A faulty string of blue Christmas lights.   
  
Jim swims through frequencies, he lets that stranger in and McCoy is blinking off and on and off again.  
  
McCoy fulfills the Portuguese proverb that says, 'An old man in love is like a flower in winter.' He blooms then, in his own subtle, understated way and Jim understands that they were meant to be together in all their complete opposites.   
  
They no longer need to borrow words, or hide from them. They have finally found them within the well worn pages of a life they wrote together but penned it through separate agendas.   
  
***  
  
There is an end, you know. Alpha, Omega. It is this way in all things: life has death, rising action leads to denoument, open to close, dawn until dusk, love and of course hate. Empires rise and then they fall.   
  
So too, McCoy thinks, when he reflects on his time with Jim. They will have each other awhile, maybe until things become too grave or too real, until they are pushed or pulled apart by time and life. McCoy pushes Jim's hair back from his face and watches his brows scrunch together before he tucks himself further away into sleep. McCoy thinks about how forever exists in Joanna's fairytales, and how time in reality is deferential, malleable.   
  
He'll never have forever with Jim.  
  
They have a paint by number love affair where humorously defined lines with numbers designate affection that always tends to bleed over and blend together. It's fragmented, by a lot of things, but in the end they find a picture of life that is beautiful, surprising and deep.   
  
But when the picture is painted, and the oils have dried on canvas, there's nothing left to do but frame it and put it on display.   
  
Like a badge of honor he'll wear their time together on the heart sewn into his sleeve.   
  
It will say: I loved Jim Kirk and for a time he loved me too.   
  
_He loved me too._


	20. Good morning, Houston

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a reference sheet for the other 19 chapters of work. It's very rough but I hope it helps you recognize some of the things I borrowed to make this story as broad as it ended up becoming. It was all of my favorite things.

Let's start at the beginning.   
  
Of course there are some direct quotes that are cited in text like the Bible quotes and additionally Bones is caught reading _The Old Man and the Sea_ by Hemingway, _The Great Gatsby_ by Fitzgerald and _The Catcher in the Rye_ by Salinger.   
  
The Chapter titles are mostly quotes (number corresponds to chapter):   
  
3\. "Whoever Believes in Him Shall Have Eternal Life" - is John 3:16; The promise of God to his people and belief in Christ  
  
5\. "Babylon Revisited" - is the title of a short story by F Scott Fitzgerald from the short story collection _Babylon Revisited and Other Short Stories_  
  
6\. "The Totality of True Thoughts is a Picture of the World" - is a quote from _Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus_  
  
7\. "Now, Voyager" - a line from _The Untold Want_ from _Leaves of Grass_ by Walt Whitman  
  
8\. "But I'll leave you now, with myself, the man I used to be..." - is a line from _The Motorcycle Diaries_ by Che Guevara  
  
9\. "Beautiful, Surprising and Deep" - this is a bit of a misquote from _Slaughterhouse Five_ by Kurt Vonnegut (it also shows up again later)  
  
10\. "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" - a Bible quote, Luke 23:34   
  
11\. "I Don't KNow What I Can Save You From" - is the name of a song by the Kings of Convenience from their album _Quiet is the New Loud_  
  
12\. "All men Kill the thing they love" - this is a line from the poem _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ by Oscar Wilde  
  
13\. "Talented and Bright; Lonely and Uptight" - from the song _Aside_ by The Weakerthans from their album _Left & Leaving_  
  
14\. "By a love so much refined, that ourselves know not what it is" - and this would be _A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning_ by John Donne   
  
15\. "So are they all, all honourable men" - of course, Mark Antony's speech from Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_   
  
16\. _"I'll marry you when you're sleeping_ \- is the name of a song by Voice on Tape  
  
17\. "It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution." - Is a quote from _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ by Oscar Wilde  
  
18\. “When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain” - is a quote by William Shakespeare  
  
19\. "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up." -Galatians 6:9  
  
Alright, I'm sure I've missed some things here and there but I'm going to try and be as comprehensive as possible.   
  
"They prepare a face to meet the faces they will meet" -- is a slight mis-quote of _The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock_ by T.S. Eliot  
  
"He has come unstuck in time." -- is of course a quote from _Slaughterhouse Five_ by Kurt Vonnegut  
  
"nothing ever saves anyone's life, it just postpones their death" -- is a line from _The History Boys_ ; Posner is the one who says it  
  
"And yet, it is the last enemy that shall be destroyed. Corinthians." -- this is a reference to the verse in Corinthians in the Bible _"The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death."_ Though many _Harry Potter_ fans will recognize it from the inscription on the graves of Lily  & James Potter  
  
"She knows by the words she is missing that the value of _'I love you'_ is passing between the two." -- this is a mis-quote from the introduction to _Musée de l'os et de l'eau (ENG: Museum of Bone and Water)_ by Nicole Brossard  
  
"he was kind of a dick, if that's what elusive means" -- is actually a line donated by my friend [](http://provetheworst.livejournal.com/profile)[**provetheworst**](http://provetheworst.livejournal.com/); or rather by her roommate. It's just stuck over time but I promised I would cite her.   
  
"That night he dreams of only one thing. That which he was born for." And this is a misquote from _The Old Man and the Sea_ by Hemingway; the actual line is "Now is the time to think of only one thing. That which I was born for."  
  
"'I'm the man who loves you.'" -- is the last line in the song _I Am Trying to Break Your Heart_ and also the title of a song ( _I'm the Man Who Loves You_ ) both by Wilco from their CD _Yankee Hotel Foxtrot_  
  
"McCoy hears the echoes of a soliloquy reverberating in his mind" -- is a hugely vague reference to the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy in Shakespeare's _Hamlet_  
  
"As the last lines from Marc Antony's speech to the Roman people slips away, he feels suddenly prepared." -- referencing Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_ and Mark Antony's speech -- "But Brutus says he was ambitious And Brutus is an honourable man, so are they all, all honourable men"   
  
" _No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do. To swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool. Deferential, glad to be of use, politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— almost, at times, the Fool._ " -- this is a verbatim quote from _The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock_ by T.S. Eliot  
  
"The Fool." -- these are the two words that McCoy pulls out of Eliot's poem; but they are reference to the tarot card, _The Fool_ which is in the Major Arcana of the tarot. The Fool can have many meanings but in most readings it means a fresh start, new beginnings, seeking adventure.   
  
"but he is as unafraid as the shepherds in the meadow when they were heralded by the angel when Christ was born." -- referencing the Bible here again when the Angel Gabriel came to the shepherds in the meadow to herald the birth of Christ -- New Testament.   
  
"genuine though somehow sad." -- again a vague reference to the movie _The History Boys_ ; Hector describes Dakin as 'somehow sad' and Dorothy replies with 'you always think they're sad'   
  
" _I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things._ " -- this is a quote by Hemingway about _The Old Man and the Sea_ ; people asked for definitive symbolism and I think this was his way of giving them the finger and saying it is what it is  
  
"'...am I in your dreams? I'd like to know...'" -- Jim is again quoting Wilco here, the song is _(Was I) in Your Dreams_ from their album _Being There_  
  
"Sweeping out the cobwebs that hold up progress and pulling the curtains and blinds to let the light in." -- half of this is a quote from _Marching Bands of Manhattan_ by Death Cab for Cutie from their album _Plans_  
  
"Jim tucks himself back into the house as if he belongs there, as if it were made for him." -- misquoting of a line from _Gone With the Wind_ \-- This is what Ashley tells Melanie when they're at the Twelve Oaks barbeque before the start of the Civil War  
  
"A man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed, but not defeated." -- this is also from _The Old Man and the Sea_ by Hemingway  
  
In the chapter on philosophy Wittgenstein and Santayana are pretty obviously quoted so I won't bother citing them anymore than to say that I'm quoting Wittgenstein from his book _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_.   
  
"They have a lot of time, or maybe they don't. But McCoy likes to think so, and so he pretends." -- misquote of the song _My Favourite Chords_ by The Weakerthans from their album _Left & Leaving_  
  
"He has shrugged off what it means to be the Fool and instead he is the Stars." -- this is another reference to the Tarot Card - I read this beautiful description of the story of the Star card and about how it became the guiding light for the Fool - how it predicts hope and healing and looking to the future which is why I chose that particular phrase there.   
  
"no man's knowledge can go beyond his experience" - a quote from philosopher John Locke  
  
"and McCoy has found his own way home" - this is actually a bit of a quote from Panic! At the Disco's song _Folkin' Around_ from their album _Pretty. Odd._   
  
The number on McCoy's baseball tee is 44, which is actually the number of famed Atlanta Braves player Hank Aaron.   
  
"Listen.   
  
Every beginning has an end, so too with this; it begins with "Listen" and ends with 'he loved me too.'" - this is a play on the beginning of the novel _Slaughterhouse Five_ by Kurt Vonnegut - I thought it was a fitting homage after his recent passing.   
  
"Circumstance being what it is; the world is everything that is the case." - Wittgenstein again with a cameo.   
  
"Yes, yes Jim. You do exist. As certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.   
  
'Thank God... you'll live and live forever.'" - a quote with some minor tweaks from the famous _Yes Virginia There Is A Santa Claus_ letter.  
  
"If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." - 1 Corinthians 13:2  
  
There's a brief allusion to Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne's _The Scarlet Letter_  
  
"He thinks of the smallest bones: the feet and the inner ear.   
  
It's such an enormous thing to walk and to listen." - Lyrics from the song _My Favourite Chords_ by The Weakerthans  
  
"they are beautiful rose-gold figures blown full of life by writers and directors, and after hours they sit around and talk in whispers and giggled innuendoes, and the ends of many adventures flow through them." - from the short story _Crazy Sunday_ by F. Scott Fitzgerald  
  
"The radio, the open door.   
  
And McCoy is this: A faulty string of blue Christmas lights.   
  
Jim swims through frequencies, he lets that stranger in and McCoy is blinking off and on and off again." - another quote from _My Favourite Chords_ by The Weakerthans  
  
"It's fragmented, by a lot of things, but in the end they find a picture of life that is beautiful, surprising and deep." - the last part is kind of a double word score. There's an allusion in there to a piece by Vonnegut, again from _Slaughterhouse Five_ ; he talks about the Tralfamadorians' concept of 'novels' however the double entendre is that "Picture of My Life" is also a song by Jamiroquai which always breaks my heart just a little.   
  
  
I think in the end I'd like to give a nod to the following for their inspiration: classic literature, general relativity, the shuttle program, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Unified Field Theory (as the Holy Grail of physics), history, String Theory, Mars Phoenix, indie music, NASA, the rodeo circuit of central Florida, astro-physics, philosophy, every movie I ever saw, Georgia summer nights, 85%+ humidity, quantum mechanics, CERN, Saturday nights second row from the top, poetry, romance languages, and the deep space network.   
  
I tried to write a real doctor and a real captain and a real space ship and a real Georgia farmhouse, but if I did my job, if I was true to all of them, they would mean many things to many people.


End file.
